The best way of undertaking a big job at a reasonable rate, is getting your tasks properly modulated. We’re pulling two of the funkiest parts of the engine out as separate projects, to be completed before assembling the engine proper. This allows us more steps along the way to tweak and modify the prototype as it’s built from the bottom up (meaning, easier testing of artwork before the engine is fully built). So an abstract:
The Touch of Death Animation Studio – embedding our animation frames and timings into our png spritesheets for us. With a multiple-character viewing utility so we can easily tweak the characters in their use of funky-funky fu. Can you dig it? (we can dig it).
The Touch of Death Level Designer – a utility for: first, eye testing art assets in the same manner that they will be displayed in the engine, second, creating level files with all the art asset locations, enemy data, and spawn timings embedded! Wicked to the max!
The save formats of both of these projects are going to be really fun to design. Libpng, our first option, doesn’t seem to provide the utility we need, so we may have to ‘keep on keepin’ on’ with our own format of image data for the sprite sheets (probably something very reminiscent of png compression). More to follow on the level designer (I call it ToDD, because after programming Delve Deeper, I can type ‘DD’ really quickly now).
In more funky news… found some inspiration this past week from these two jams, check them out, we’re still considering our licensing options at this point:
The Jimmy Castor Bunch – It’s Just Begun
Sly & The Family Stone – Underdog
I’m surprised I don’t hear more Underdog samples. Catch you on the flip side.
libpng provides _more_ than the functionality we need, actually, and since it won’t be available on Android, it isn’t really worth the effort to dig into it at this point. All I was using it for was the decoding/encoding of PNGs, so I’ve switched over to using the built-in PNGDecoder/PNGEncoder classes in .NET 3.0.
The Animation Studio itself is written using WPF, and lets us construct animation sequences, play them at speed, and attach metadata to the entities involved, so we can make ToD extremely data-driven, which will make it much easier to update in the future.
I’ll probably revisit libpng when it comes time to start work on the engine for our next desktop game. We’re planning to target Mac and Linux as well as Windows next time, so cross-platform support will be important.