THE FIGHTERS RESOURCE - Official Thread

[RabidPeep]

Yeah, but ideally most of the code would be shared between characters, with special exceptions made as needed. That's how this'll get done - only doing unique code for the exceptions, not for each character.

Basically, the goal is to write ass little code as possible to be as efficient as possible.

I'd like to get as much of Ocks programmed in as possible ASAP.

What's your plan on the creation of the rest of the movesets? Are you gonna do it, or will it be distributed for people to [mostly] make their own, given a simple interface?

I am skeptic and am aware that people are motivated and are alot more into the project now and how my skepticism can bring some people's mood a down a bit. Congrats and goodjob on working hard and getting somewhere fast Rabid. But I'm more of a programmer and am interested in how you're going about making movesets internally. Is the Ocks you showed more of a "mockup" and coded without much thought just to show something, or did you already lay down a solid, stable, and manageable system?

Make progress, but also be sure to remain grounded.

Right now I'm blocking out the behavior of the base character. Basically the 'Generic Fighter' template. I'm just using Ocks as a graphical display due to his sheet being complete and it caught my eye first going through the thread. Once I've established the code base, I'll set it up so that it draws data from a file to determine which sprites to use (I'm unsure if GMtudio can actually import animations programmatically at first blush, or if I'll have to import gifs), as well as set up the basic parameters for the character's stats.

The oddball is when unique details come into play such as character specific behaviors (like Kirby's floaty jumps, Falcos fast descent, Knockback, that sort of thing) which will have to be handled either as generic additions (text file reads "projectile, sprFireBall.gif,speed=10,damage=20, fire" and generates an object with sprFireBall.gif as the sprite, giving it a directional speed of 10, the projectile deals 20 damage on contact, and the fire qualifier means that it can catch opponents on fire) or completely handled by novel programming.

So, yes I wanted to show something fast, but it's on the way to getting the base level character parameter setup so that I can get something for testing characters into everyone's hands as fast as possible.

Also, this isn't hard yet. This is me cocking around with Game Maker making it do things in a way I'm far more familiar with (Python is my primary language, but amusingly enough I haven't gotten around to learning/making engines for Pygames yet, ha). The hard stuff will be the fine tuning. After all, the first 90% takes 90% of the time, but the last 10% takes 90% too (a joke in the game design community, basically always expect things to take longer than you expect, even if you're already expecting it to take longer).

Edit2 One more thing...

Do we have an established health bar/number sprites yet for the GUI? Figured it'd be good to add that in now that I'm getting to the attacks and stuff. If not I'll just use text placeholders in the meantime.