ShockBots Dev Blog

Today was frustrating.  I had hours of no progress trying to get the boomer anims in.  I eventually reset transforms on all the parts and re-rigged the thing.  Earlier in the day I changed all the code that referenced the chomper directly to use whatever mob is spawned.  That’s a pretty big deal because it makes it much easier to add more mobs.  I also made one master texture for all mobs and the boomer and chomper now share that texture.  The boomer has been UV mapped but I still need to paint it’s texture.

Here’s a pic of some boomers walking towards the player:

So I re-rigged the shooter and did Shoot, Die, Idle, and Wake anims.  I also created the Boomer, a large cylinder bot that explodes when it gets close to the player.  I wanted to test the rig and was listening to internet radio and decided to make this anim:

Shockbots_2013.01.27

I figured out what was wrong with my anim exporter and documented the correct way to export anims.  I needed to bake down the anims and convert to point helpers and export that.  Not elegant, but I don’t have time to make it perfect.

I got an explosion animated and hooked it up so it plays when a mob dies.

One problem I am running into is a lot of stuff was hard coded – referencing a specific map or mob – so I keep having to go back and convert it to a generic function.  I guess it’s one of the pitfalls of really rapid development.

I also added the ability to scale nodes in an animation, so the fireball can expand.

I didn’t have a consistent unit scale between my environment and my characters – so I rescaled everything.

Problems: Chomper model is now having animation issues – and depending on the export I sometimes get small mesh pieces.

So no progress today and the game looks a bit worse.  I had to go into work for my last day so I can blame that.

The studio where I worked just shut down.   Yuck!  While I look for work I am going to try to complete my second game!

Here is a look at where I am since my last post ages ago.

Hi, I’m documenting the creation of my flash game.  I am currently working full time, but expect that to change soon.  Once I am free I will be working on this game for hopefully 1 month and will try to make some money off of it at FlashGameLicence.  We’ll see!