Make over!!! Having introduced our first female bruiser last week, Steve continued ironing out her design this week. We’ve got a slight improvement to the existing hair style, and a bunch more designs for options to be placed in the bruiser generator. Aside from that we’ve got some additional animation cycles for our lady in red.
Steve's got another seven animation cycles roughed out in her repertoire. This finishes off her nine basic movements and five of her eight basic attacks, leaving me with twenty-eight more cycles to go before she’s up-to-speed with her male counterpart.
Steve wasn’t entirely satisfied with how the hair was looking on her, so he did a little bit of revision. It’s subtle, but we think it works better…
->
Original on Left -> Revision on Right
In fact, while he was at it, he designed a whole bunch of new hair styles. As you know, we intend on allowing for character customization. Hence the reason that Steve’s animating bald eyeless characters.
And of course, we had to test out some of the palette swaps as well:
Nice! I've never seen a game with both pixel sprites and character customization before. I'm guessing the hair and eyes are rendered separately and rely on coordinates associated with each frame or something to that end? Are the hair and eyes animated as well? Very cool pixel art and animation!
Yeah, you guessed right with the idea of them being rendered separately and being matched with coordinates.
There will be swappable eyes and hair, and while I haven't decided how much animation if any will exist on hair (part of the reason I was aiming for short hair cuts instead of pony tails or pig tails) there will definitely be some different expressions per eye piece depending on if the character is blinking, or has just been hit.
At the very minimum, there will be a 3/4 view of each piece of hair, and a back view (for when a character is climbing something). As much as I'd like more dynamic hair, I think it's a feature that I'll likely have to leave out.
Actually, you might also want to check out this post from a while back for more on how we're planning on assembling the characters :)
Indiedb.com
Cool, thanks. Always interesting to read technical stuff on custom built engines :).