Sprites Don't Grow on Trees

Just a little update from before. My black circles are now a sprite. looking nicer now. although it's so hard to line them out to give out that illusion of this thing moving. it can actually be achieved by using the following layering technique.. Instead of slicing and placing individual masks on to their appropriate place, I just use the entire sprite sheet, and cover the places I don't want user to see with a masking layer, and create a new movie clip (the shadow) as a hitbox ( so other objects on the sprite doesn't actually activate if it hit something).

And for the actual Sprite editing, I'm using a free program called ASEPRITES. it's pretty awesome. at first, i was gonna use Photoshop, but for some reason, my tablet doesn't really want me to do this project, so I just search for alternative. The program's quite good actually. they have similar functions as Photoshop such as... ya know, layers, horizontal flip and things.

Sprite editing is hard. They didn't teach this in class. I mean.. well I do learn how to draw in drawing class. but when working with actual single pixels, there's no right way to do it. I mean, it's just either it looks good, or it looks bad.

 

and then I've done a bit of programming to determine where does the sprite going / heading, so the mask later stops at the right place . if _x is positive, the the sprite is facing right, if it's negative, it's going left. same goes with y axis. Things like this just clicks once you sit down and actually doing the stuff.

So.. no more boring stuffs. Time to see this in action... and here goes. check out the flash below. ( ignore the version number, forgot to edit.. blergh.

The next thing on the agenda will be, to make these townspeople wear some clothes. and it'll be boring to make the wear the same clothes.  I have to randomize them . and to do so, I'll have to include another later of sprites on top of the one before... and one more layer for pants, and one more layer for hairs.

Good thing I can just make one shirt, and adjust the colours, and automatically get 7 variant of it. here's some of the things I'll be posting on my next post.

The Interface

Well.. to cut things short, I've done several things and I'm too lazy to update every now and then. this is not a good system. I should indeed post everything on my journal when I did something, or change something. but well.. I will, soon, in the future.

So right now I have set up the stage, like so:

 

and this should be the base of my UI.  not sure if It's efficient, but I'm pretty sure it'll go through a loads of transformation in the final product.

And for the game bit itself, I've made a little something something, just to test out the AI and the customer generator. it doesn't look too great for now. but hey, It's working, I suppose. =3 the graphic's just circles and blacks.. but hey, once I have this working, I can just whip up the sprites and some dress-em-ups. and done the first small portion of the code.

Making The choice

Have you ever been in that situation in which you have to make a choice. but you love to do both options? welp..  that's what I'm facing right now. The thing is, if it didn't work out. I have no idea if I could back out and choose the others. but.. here goes.

I'm picking the tycoon type game.

final answer.


now let's just see how long does it take for that decision to bite me in the behind.