Been having some great forward momentum on Turnover over the last couple of weeks. Many new sprites, a few more levels in progress, and more.
Animations
I’ve been adding more frames of animation to the game characters.
Here’s a demo of Clea’s old move animation and her new one with added animation frames.
After:
Not a massive change, but still a good step towards something smoother. I have added similar frames to every moving character. I’ve also added more frames to certain effects, such as smoke, dust, bullet impacts, icons, and so on.
Vision Cones
Something else I’ve completed recently is something that has long been on my to do list — making the vision cones of the NPCs look dirty and low res.
After:
Engine:
Lots of tiny, boring things completed on the engine since the last update. Here’s a quick idea of what I took care of.
- Made sure that I didn’t assign shared_ptrs where I didn’t need to. Should cut down on the reference count hit for those.
- Some return rewriting —
Don’t really need to do:
if (blah > yadda) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
If —
return (blah > yadda);
— works just as well.
- More precaching and heap allocations before game start. Doing everything I can to avoid any heap allocations while ticking.
- Put in more graceful error handling, so the game silently fails with the log file to tell you why.
- Increased encapsulation. For example. the ExpSystem class should handle everything related to experience, instead of having to write something outside of that class.
- Some class restructuring. For example, PathNPC is now NPC, and I moved everything shared between all NPCs to that class. Should help with any other NPC I make in the future.
- Increased number of draw layers for the engine. Now, a light can be drawn under a street lamp, for example.
- And a lot of other small things.
That should give you an idea of the smaller things. Even when there isn’t much accomplished, new changes are always steps towards a more stable code base.
I’ve finally put down engine work for a bit. I felt that I needed to move forward on art and design, so that’s where I’ve been putting my main focus lately.
