Swamp Week powers on! I did more boring work on the background, tedious tedious, then sketched up monsters until I got tired (which is right now)
(Background lightened to see the concept art clearer)
What is the ever-pressing goal of swamp week? Simple! To get as much swamp related material as I can done by Friday. I believe we can plow through a decent chunk of the swamp this week, so long as nothing catches fire. The over-arching principal is that I work on what I feel like working on, but it has to be swamp related. So instead of being unmotivated and paining through weeks of animation bases, I can do whatever feels right that day. And swamps feel so right.
A rough week of being ill and sleeping randomly for 6 hour chunks of time, only to be awake for 2 before doing it again is not particularly productive, as you can see. So this is your neglectful dad telling you he’ll make it up to you and take you someplace nice just as soon as he can. (this week, though)
As a disclaimer, I am nobody’s programmer. I have only the slightest idea what I’m doing here, so take everything here at face value.
Thus far I’ve just been talking about the work in flash itself, but I mentioned before that these images will be saved and imported into the game as pngs (hereby referred to as “old-school style”). So how do I plan on doing this?
What we have here is the exact same movie clip eight times. What I ended up doing is telling flash to freeze each of these different clips at a different frame (1-8), and to hide everything that isn’t what we’re wanting to see. So for example, we’ll show the shirt, how it is in every different frame, and hide everything else. This creates the entire set that we’ll then save and import into the game itself. This part of the system is basically finished, I am just fumbling my way through an actual save button (because a print-screen is for chumps). I’m also trying to work through the obvious conflict that you can see with the shirt and the far arm. The way things are layered in flash isn’t the flat image you’re getting to see here. I have a few options for fixing this, the most likely of which would involve me just editing the flat png image slightly before import. It seems like work, but a little bit of erasing is going to be a lot easier than demanding our best-friend programmer layer each piece individually, not to mention he’d probably murder me.
The part that’s missing mostly is that they aren’t lined up properly yet. I’ll have to figure out out of the entire set what the widest point is, and what the tallest point is for the animation, and then make sure every frame is basically centered to that standard.
