Status of the engine

[Runouw]

So I guess it's been a while since I've posted an update to the engine.
With the slow speed the project has been moving, I've had lots of time to rethink things about the engine. And being years later I have learned a lot more about programming.

The last feature I was actively working on was the character designer, but I have scratched that idea because I have found out a way to make the character designer 10x better and more efficient to use for this project. And by that I plan to move the character designer out of the game and will be designing a plugin for Helix which should be able to create customizable characters for this project. For those of you who do not know what Helix is, it's an animation program very similar to Flash Player that me and a few friends have started working on.
http://code.google.com/p/helixproject/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/helixproject/
The plugin I plan on creating will be very simple to use if you are familiar with animating in flash. Also note that Helix will be free and open source and so the plugin will also most likely be open source.

And I am also considering moving the game's code to HaXe (an open source, multi-platform language very similar to AS3; in fact so similar, porting it won't take much time at all) so that this game can not only be a flash game, but it could also be released as a computer game (running off of C++ or Java) so that we don't have to deal with the limitations of flash.

And I've never had a chance to discuss the issue of money involved with the project. But there is no doubt that flash games make revenue (even ones that have absolutely no ads in them can still earn a few thousand dollars). So I was wondering what plans you have for the profits the game could make. Originally, I planned on giving the majority of the profits (around %50) straight to the TSR website and the rest would be split among all the people who have contributed the to the project. But then it could turn into a big fight over who did the most work. And honestly to me, this project is meant to be a fan project and it doesn't seem right for it to used as a source of profit to anyone.

[Ton]

Profit is never a thing I considered. The way the project is going though, I'd wait to cross that bridge when/if we come to it.
I'm happy to see you around, though. I'll check out your updates now.
Oh, and Sukapon is pretty much done if you'd like to play with him in the engine!

[mutantyoshi]

This is great info
...but profit...
we don't own any of these characters, so if we made a profit off of this game[/align], would that come back and bite us in the butt due to copyright infringements and all that hoopla?

[Runouw]

The "profit" comes from ads either in the game or on the page itself.
On Newgrounds, even if you don't have advertisements in the game, you get "Flash Portal Ad" impressions which is a pretty low eCPM of $.10 but it's still something. And also, there is value in getting users to redirect to another site. That's why some flash games have sponsorships (Money paid from a sponsor to make a flash game advertise for their site). Because, for example, there are people who play that game and click the sponsor's "Play More Games" button which gives that sponsor's website more views. This makes that sponsor's site more popular and the sponsor collects ad revenue from all the people redirected to their site from the flash game.

There are also plenty of fan games and fan movies out there that make money from in-game ads even though all the characters are copyrighted. I haven't seen companies do anything about this except for a rare case when a Pokemon MMO was taken down. But most of the time the big companies leave fan games/movies alone. Maybe it's because it could help boost their sales by reinvigorating consumer interest for their IPs.

[ThePortalGuru]

This looks absolutely gorgeous, Runouw! So are you going to be working on a new engine with Helix now? Any idea as to how long that would take? When will the first version of Helix become available?

[Dazz]

I never considered any sort of monetary part of this entire thing... I'm going to say to leave that as a vote from people, I mean the money would be awesome to help tSR's server costs, and we could maybe run some awesome competitions and stuff. I think once the game is closers to a proper release we can think about that more.

My brother makes flash games professionally, so he can probably help us obtain sponsorship when it does come to it.

[Ton]

Heh, assuming this project has new life breathed into it.

[Runouw]

Yeah, I've been wondering why things a slowing down so much.
We now have Sukapon nearly 100% complete along with plenty nearly finished base sprites for other characters. Pikachu, Gooey, and Mario were all going really well, but they seemed to have gone inactive lately.

As for Helix, it's 100% open source so I'm hoping other people pick up on the idea and decide to help out, but until then I can handle making everything that is needed in Helix to get a character designer plugin working. I have no idea how long that would take and if it goes too slowly I can always just keep using the old character designer I made.

I don't know if posting a playable version of the engine again will be worth it until we have at least 2 playable characters. Before we had Gooey as the only (nearly complete) playable character, but now that Gooey has been started over I can't put him back in until his animations are more complete (But so far his new animations are looking great, the intro was really smooth). So far I can only make the engine have Sukapon as the only playable character and that won't show much improvement since last time except for a different character.

[ThePortalGuru]

I thought Gooey was staying the same since he fit the new style?

[Ton]

I think that's what we decided. I'm also very VERY slowly working on Porky, so maybe we can use him eventually.

[Star]

So if things picked up, we could see the engine?
Hmm..

Ton, if you need any help on Porky. PM me. I'll try to do as much as I can, even though I got alot on my plate.
Not gonna lie, I am not pleased with the sprite progress of this project at all. :/

[Ton]

Neither am I. Nobody has touched it in a long time, and I gave up.
I'm kind of burned out on trying to sprite. I've accepted the fact that I'm about as good as I'm going to get.
That said, if you want to take the reigns and have me do... whatever, I'm totally on board. I'll touch up, brainstorm, sketch, whatever.

If you want to do anything, PLEASE do. I'll willingly and graciously take any help you want to give, and with your name attached I think people might start caring again.

[Star]

There is actually one vital thing that I need..
You see, I do animation a pretty tedious way. I make it in MSPaint, and I test out to see how the animation is in a GIF Animator. I'll go back and forth like that until the animation is right. Sometimes..I get lucky(like in the New Super Mario Kart topic)and don't have to do that. Someone informed me a while back that there are some nice programs out there now that allow you to see how your animation looks AS your sprite.

Something like that would make it SO much faster for me to make smooth animations.
As to how the animation of the characters look like..I still have my copy of brawl for that ; )

For the moment, that is the only thing I ask of you. I don't think this program is GraphicsGale(which I do not like btw). I wish I could remember the name of it. <__>

[Ton]

[Ton]

http://pro-motion.software.informer.com/screenshot/
http://digicel-flipbook.software.informer.com/

There's these, but I haven't seen them in action cause you have to pay for them. I'm going to search for something free.