Animation Editor - finished! (except for bugs...)

So I finally finished the animation editor. There's a few bugs to work out, but above is a quick video of it in action, loading a saved animation, and playing it back in the editor. Now on the animation component for Alta to be able to use them in game!

Something's coming....

Spring/Summer 2011...

Feature creep

Life has got in the way again, and slowed me down, but I'm still plugging away with this animation editor. I would like to find a way to seperate it out from the rest of Alta, so I can share it with the community, but haven't figured out how yet.

The title refers of this post refers to the extra bits I've added to the animation editor and the extra bits I'm planning to add.

I've already added an option to flip parts horizontally when creating frames, and a playback feature in the editor, and I'm planning on including an 'onion skin' effect to overlay frames on each other, and a feature which creates sprite sheets from the frames.

So I'm still hard at work, but it may be another week before I'm finished, we'll see.

Ooops!

Well, best laid plans and all that. Life has once again got in the way the past month or so, but I'm still making progress on Mario, or more precisely, the animation editor for Mario. I've almost finished it, and will stick up some screen shots in the next couple of days, plus maybe a video of the animation preview feature in action.

I've also grabbed the domain name http://www.rabidlion.com/, which now points to this blog. Soon I'll be putting together a propper website for Rabid Lion Games, and then I'll link this blog in from there.

I've realised in the course of making the various tools for Mario, that none of them are actually specific to Mario itself, or even to platformers. As such, once I've completed Mario, I will be integrating the Map and Animation editors into Alta. Mario will also involve me writing in an Animation engine to read the character files created by my animation editor, and a physics engine (which will most likely be a wrapper around Farseer).

So Alta is still growing, and I'm still hopeful that by Xmas I'll have made the first commercial game with Alta. However, it's looking more and more like that will be a Windows Phone 7 game rather than Xbox 360. The more I look at it, the more I believe Windows Phone 7 will take off in a big way, and getting in early on the platform could yield some serious rewards.

Arcade Mayhem (working title), my first xbox game has been shelved for the minute, and a new game (codenamed project Circlevania) is my target. However the temptation to 'cash-in' on a simpler, less imaginative game is very strong.

Anyway, that's it for now, been a bit of a ramble. Hopefully the next update will be more coherent!

And hopefully it will be significantly less than 6 weeks before I post here again!