Case 6, there are enemies too??

In the sixth and final week of our casework, we were to make an enemy that would follow our character wherever he goes. The pirate is supposed to fight different versions of policemen. The first policeman the pirate is supposed to meet, is a nicely dressed fbi looking guy. So I had to make a completely new animation, which now turned out to be a whole lot easier than the first animations I made. This time, e drew a quick sketch first, then I drew the first frame with pen tool. I cut the arms and legs in two and made the body and the head separate symbols as well. Then, with a bit of free transform and copy and paste, i needed only draw that one frame with pen tool. Why did I not think of this before? Anyway, the time sucking part was of course the scripting part. The enemy starts in the top of the stage, the wall the furthest away from the "camera" . As he moves, his y-value decreases along with an increasing of size. There are three rows of desks in the first background, which makes two paths for the enemy to walk in. If the enemy hittests against a invisible box that is where the horizontal paths, which there also is two of, and the pirate is on the opposite side from the pirate, the enemy with the nice suit will change his path. This is per definition to follow the pirate. Or at least I hope so. Or else I'm pretty much fucked. Then if the evil FBI police enemy reaches the bottom, a big go sign with a sign blinks to the left, not unlike this:
<=go!
If you follow it and go as far as you can to the left of the screen, the pirate turns around and faces a whole other wall, the cozy place of the office where everything is made to look like it's a jungle.

Case 5, Hills and Pistols and somthing called sprite

This week I will not only make a hill for my pirate to walk up and down, I will not only make a hill for my pirate to walk up and down AND a pistol that he can pick up if he feels like it, I will also make a sprite. After confusing moments with lots of stupid questions, I have now figured out what a sprite is. A sprite is a movieclip in flash that contains other movieclips, sort of like a car with people in it. You have to open the door in case to get the people inside and you have to know which door to open in order to get the right person from the car. You do not, as an example, want to drag the driver out of the car on a highway in the middle of a turn while the man in the passengerseat is paralyzed from the waist and up and will not be able to grab hold of the wheel. To be honest I just made that up, but I must admit it sounds kind of reasonable. If I am wrong, the clock IS 07.12 AM in the time of writing. And not in the morning, in the night. Anyways, I put my 5 character animations in the same movieclip, and found myself using a great deal of time understanding how to get these people out from the car. In no way do I find this efficient, but I believe it is absolutely necesseray to maintain a little pit of structure in the script. I have, by the way, not yet been very structured in my use of scripts, but this is something that later will be applied when my understandig for the script increases. The pistol i so carefully has drawn to make it look lik a magnum now dissapears when I touch it. The pirates anchorpoint hittests against its filling. If it hits, then the pistol removechilds. Easy peasy. When someone sits next to you and tells you how to do it. And as for the levitation in the terrain, I also used a hittest. Every time it hits, the pirate's y-value raises by one. I also added som gravity, since it can't really hittest against a little mountain, when he is on top of it and he is walking down. So I solved this case in a most satisfying way for my own sake. Not a whole lot of expectations to my programming skills yet but it will only get better in time.

Case 4, Scripts and shit

We shall now make our interactive experience interactive. I will during this week make my pirate walk, both to the left, AND to the right. And also will he not go awat from the stage even if you try to. I've been present at all the lectures concerning this matter, still I fail to understand anything of how I'm going to make such a event happen. Luckily, our teacher has uploaded a recipe for this for us to use as guidance. Rather than use it for guidance, I ended up with it. I have absolutely no supposition to do anything other than following it to the letter. So i changed a bit of words here and there, made no other modifications whatsoever, and than I was finished. Good job Sondre!

Now even the background moves...!

For this case, the third one for those of you who have trouble with numbers, we were supposed to draw three different backgrounds with three different layer that moves in different speed, depending on the distance from the camera, and then put the previously animated character into the background. The result would be kind of like a teaser to the game i'm going to make. Nobody likes teasers, some people just begs to be raped. Myself has never raped anyone, neither have i delibartly teased anyone. I have never done this, because it is not as easy as one would think. For one you need muscle strenght or the knowledge to handle a weapon, for the other you need sex appeal. Try yourself to tease anyone with a 9mm gun. They run away, like a girl getting raped by a man with no sex appeal.
My pirate is seen from behind as you can observe from the screenshots i have not yet published. The thought is that there will be coming people, first from one of the four walls in the room, then he turns 90 degrees and there is a new backgound and new people coming from new places. I had to animate the backgrounds so that i gave an illusion of 3d. After at least several minutes of searching on the internet, i found nothing useful, so I had to develop my own technique. I managed it by moving one background to the right, out of the stage, while rotating it downwards, while i moved another background to the right into the stage, while rotating it upwards so that the to animations made a little rainbow. Seemed like to happy animations. So then there was only left to make my character move around on these backgrounds. Easy as pie. That's why I sit here 05.30 in the morning writing my blog. No timepressure or anything like that. Just the perfect amount of work. Not to much at all. Nono. Not for me...

Second case, the pirate starts moving

It's been six days now since the completion of my character, and what i've been doing since then, as mentioned above, is getting him to move. We were supposed to make him go to the left, to the right, make him jump and to animate some kind of waiting move. I've went with frame to frame animation all the way, which is the animation that demands the least of technical capasity. Haven't been facing lots of problem, except lack of time. It demands lots of time to make it look good and not just like something you just drew in your scratchbook. So, after reaching this conclusion, i have reached another one. All of my current animations are sketches, and will later on be drawn better with the pen tool. The animations themselves look good, it's the drawings that are crude and messy. I've began picturing what my game is going to look like, and i would like it to be a hybrid between a tower defense game, and wack-a-mole, which all of us has spent hours on the circus with, pretending the moles was everyone in the hole world who found walking with their pants down on their knees cool. It's okay to hate them, we all did, and still do. Even though their gone now, they will be back, since fashion tends to return every 20 years. And I know what your thinking, haha, pants down on their knees, that probably looks really stupid, I'm glad i never walked around like that. You did walk around like that, just like every other sheep who jumped out from the cliff if only someone famous did it first. So for those of you who thought this to be a gaming blog, you're wrong. This is a blog to harass fashions, no matter how old dated, and all of their followers. No, i am just kidding. And to those of you who didn't stop reading 7 lines ago, I have drawn my pirate from behind. This is how I picture the game, The pirate standing behind some kind of cover in the front of the screen, shooting at whoever is in his line of sight. With him stands his pirate crew, which he will, depending on how much the player sucks, be able to upgrade in series of ways. I am hoping such a game will not be to advanced for me. Yarrh.

Case 1, The Pirate

The first thing that hit me when we got the assignment ¨make a character that you later will use for an interactive experience¨ was that I really wanted to make a pirate. Pirates are drunks, violent and have little respect for societie's written and unwritten rules, and therefore make brilliant models for a character that have all these abilities. Abilities that encourages situations of chaos and lots of fun. For my first sketch i drew a pirate looking at different pictures of Jack Sparrow and others. Wierdly enough, this character turned out to be not too original. So I sat down to think. I was already sitting, but i started thinking as well. It suddenly hit me that I have a friend. That made me feel pretty good, but the point was that this friend og mine is chubby, small of height, has a lot of beard and origins from the exotic country of the Phillipines. His name is Steffen. For me, he seemed like a perfect model for a pirate. So i drew a new sketch, he was fatter, smaller and more ugly looking ( no offence Steffen). A plan for the my interactive experience was also falling into place more or less. The thought was this: a pirate sitting on his ship in a major city, surrounded by yatchs and other fancy boats. He's on his last drop of rom and is more and more reaching the conclusion that the 21'st century is not a good place for a pirate. So at the bottom og the well, his life of plunder, prostitution and drinking hanging by a thin thread, he makes a decision that he don't really know is himself, takes with him his cannon and piratecrew to turn around this life of boredom. Where does he go? Pay close attention to to my progress in this project and maybe one day you will find out.