Articles Written By: Ben

*UPDATE: Future Ben here. I’m taking this project offline so it’s not a security concern for the site. I’ve got more interactivity planned in the future but with more secure, up to date tech*

You know how they say the last 10% is the hardest to complete? That’s pretty true, though sometimes it feels like a whole lot more than 10%. Budgeting 3 days of coding was good though I probably should have focused on the different play modes first and left the menu screens for the last bit. The play modes had a habit of breaking whenever I added something new, which meant tracking down bugs. There’s a few I wasn’t able to get that are either Stencyl specific or Flash debugger specific. (Specifically one with the custom bullseye mouse cursor where the score and other text jumped around it instead of where they were supposed to be) There’s also something up with my high score code that causes a second game to not start properly. I figure I’ll go over it again sometime when I’ve got fresher eyes to look at it. As it stands it’s playable and a satisfactory coding exercise.

This title screen might look familiar. I resized it and adjusted the title for this game.

I’ve tinkered with different styles for the menu screens and I like this one so far. Some of this stuff might change depending on what I can accomplish in code.

This is the overlay that will pop up over the screen when paused.

Here’s that same overlay with a background behind it for some context.

I probably don’t need to add an options page but I figured I’d at least put in some volume sliders. Still need to figure out how they’re going to work in code but I’ll cross that bridge soon enough.

I had the idea of doing a wanted poster for the menus for the last game and I think it works decently for the credits screen. Thinking I might add some nails or something to have the paper pinned up instead of just laying there.

I like working on this mini project but as it’s not exactly drawing (rather graphic design and coding) and that was kind of the point of starting the exercise, I’ve moved things around in the day so I’m drawing first.

I spent today sorting all the graphics I’ve made so far and dropping them into a new project in Stencyl. I’ve got the basics working of an infinite line of targets that switch expressions when you click on them. Next I need to add the score system, music and sound, and menu screens. I’m glad I didn’t leave all the coding until the very end. That very easily could have clogged up a step in prototyping this. Biggest pain in the butt was getting all the sprites sized properly. I’d settled on a standard size and halfway through realized I needed to go bigger. Then I needed to center them all and line up the changing expressions so there wouldn’t be any jitter when they swap. A handful required coding to put them all even on the ground. I’m satisfied I’ve gotten this much sorted out now but grumpy I’ve been dealing with tech instead of art. :/ I like making the Daily Doodles a mini project though I think the next one I’m going to make more related to my main project I’ve been working on so they don’t compete with each other.

Today’s Doodle consists of various backdrops for the shooting gallery game. The first one’s a fake meant to resemble a crappy fair game while the others are shots from around the area. We’ll see how well they drop into the game later. You’ll notice I left a box up top labeled “game size” because that’s how big the game screen came in when I scaled and multiplied it a couple times. (I work at a higher resolution and scale down) It’s a good thing to have open as you work to get an idea of what it’s going to be shrunken down to.

Today’s Daily Doodle is another set of shooting gallery targets. I’d like to add a little variety to the game when I put it together. It’s a good idea to pace myself, though, so I don’t start thinking up a million things I could add instead of actually doing the work to add stuff.

This week I’ve decided to focus the Daily Doodle on one project. I’m going to put together a flash shooting gallery game using what I made while working on Fennec Fox: Gunslinger. Each day I’ll post some art and hopefully on the final day I’ll have a prototype to share. Here we see the first bunch of targets. Some are good guys and some are bad guys. The top row are their “alive” states and the bottom are what they should swap to when you shoot them.

Today’s doodle is based on Friday’s where I decided animate the little pin up girl character. I played around a lot with this one and could have kept adding stuff to the point of making it a video clip instead of a gif. I think for this exercise I should keep animations short so I can focus on making longer animations for bigger projects.  This was just about the right length to enjoy working on for the afternoon.