A Koopa's Tail: Under the Weather

[Phaze]

So, I take it that you are the primary coder for this project then? How much progress have you guys made?

Edit: Sorry for asking these dumb questions, but I was only wondering.

The only coder, actually.

Ridge has been doing sprite work and tweaking the story here and there.

As for me, I have two separate things to do for this project. The first is a tool that will enable Ridge to make sprite animations out of individual pieces of a character, along with other things like sprite transformations/palette changing either parts of the whole frame of a sprite. It'd be much more efficient and hopefully less tedious than making whole sprite frames for animations by hand, "GIF" style. If you notice animations of bigger characters like Bowser in BIS you'll notice that parts seem to move individually.

While I admit I'm having trouble being productive, I'd like to be doing this by myself for now. Legal reasons, I guess. In short, I want to cannibalize part of the AKT engine in order to work on another game and not having any others involved in engine production shall prevent legal issues since we're keeping the game engine proprietary (I've discussed this with Ridge in private, previously)

I have to admit that if I can't get started proper soon I wouldn't be too opposed to help on the animator since I want it to essentially be a FOSS program.

Then after that is the engine for the actual game itself. I'll essentially be doing that from scratch, but I think I'd probably have an easier time with the engine instead of the animator because I'm honestly unfamiliar with GUI programming and thus don't quite know what to use in order to perform a specific function yet. I need some specific things like a graphics editor's "layer" dialogue and such.

Obviously the engine will use the animation files made by the tool along with tile sheets in order to animate characters in the engine. However, I guess I'm trying to do the animator first since it'd be kinda hard to move on without proper graphics unless I use really flat placeholders.

As for actual progress, I've sorta done a bare skeleton of the GUI thus far,but it still has some "problems" (trying to get resizing parts of windows to work correctly and the splitters don't want to inhabit the same space as other components I put in there as placeholders) and it has no actual functionality yet. I do have an idea of how the animation format would look (at least in XML) but I haven't made a formal spec for the format as such, yet.

Man I almost make it sound like I know what I'm doing!