Moving Pixels

Animating is hard, so I thought I'd go through what I do when creating sprite animations. Sprite work is great because although it takes a while, the results are really nice looking. And who doesn't like a bit of retro. In this case I tried to make a simple 3 combo attack animation as seen in many platforming fighter games like Henry Hatsworth and the Megaman games.

Creating a simple reference sprite is really useful to work with because it really reminds you of the proportions and ratios everything as you create each frame - something I've always had a problem with. To help deal with this I tend to begin animations with really simple stick figure. Stick figures are also great for prototyping ideas in your head and getting the right poses due to their nature of being really easy to draw. It also helps to have seen all those stick man fighting animations like the Xiao Xiao series.

This choreograph is loosely based on a similar series of attacks used by the games mentioned above.

More Os and Xs

Previously on STR.

With the -amazing gameplay- sorted out I need to work out the rest of the stuff. This means UI and graphics and possibly sound, and whatnot.

I think it would be great for the game to actually end when a player wins, and to restart after finishing. Additionally I want a line to be shown indicating where the win has occurred and some pop-up text declaring who's won or not. A score counter would be useful too.

TacTicToeTwo

This is a continuation from this post. I'll recall, from the that blog post for posterity:

1. Player x selects a space on the grid to place their block.
2. Game checks to make sure that space is empty.
3. Game places block on that space, updates the grid in code.
4. Game checks if a 3-in-a-row has occurred. If true, step 5, else step 6.
5. Game stops, congratulates Player x on a Win.
6. Game checks if all spaces are filled, in which case it is a Draw.
7. Otherwise, Game swaps control to Player y, and moves back to step 1 with x and y reversed.

Baby Steps

Unless someone has amazing godlike talent, or are the product of super secret government experiments, of which I count myself as being in neither, it is safe to assume no one can immediately become an expert on things. Now I'm not going to say I'm new to programming, but to make games, like anything takes a lot of practice.

Therefore, with my amateur programming knowledge, questionable art skills and dubious musical capabilities, I am going to attempt for my first 'project' to build something simple. Really simple. Something I shouldn't be able to feasibly mess up beyond all recognition.

So I'll start with good old Tic Tac Toe, aka Noughts and Crosses. And for extra kicks, try to get it working as a simple App on Android (there's a legitimate reason for that!).
Disclaimer: This is written as a semi-tutorial, documenting my own failures and success at getting this working. Feel free to follow along, but don't expect a miracle, and don't expect to learn anything particularly new, or interesting. And certainly do not take this as a standard by which you should go about doing anything. Do not. Donot. Donut.