Protectors of Kittaria

asollazzo

Member
Hi Guys, Im Currently working on my first game after starting to learn programming 4-5 months ago. Ive probably put a solid 2-3 months into Protectors of Kittaria (name isnt set in stone yet) and have the base game coding sorted for the most part.

The game is essentially a top down shooter combined with a tower defense game and in some parts will be a tower offense game. Only single player is planned so far as i think co-op multiplayer might be out of my programming reach at the moment :)

Ive just started on producing some actual art now rather than my programmer art so should be able to start showing off alot more of the game.

Have a few images here showing a work in progress sketch of a level and then a mostly finished house (that will serve as the players hub), and then a also mostly finished player character and a short run animation :)

map.jpg
house.jpg
cat.jpg
run.gif

I still need to sort out screencapping abit of actual gameplay and get it onto youtube, but until then im open to any crits you guys have of the stuff you see here :)
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
Hmm, nice art and animations. Congrats.

Top-down Shooter and Tower Defense are easy picks. My only suggestion is going for a small project at first.

Cheers!
 

asollazzo

Member
Hmm, nice art and animations. Congrats.

Top-down Shooter and Tower Defense are easy picks. My only suggestion is going for a small project at first.

Cheers!
Thanks :) And yes i can already tell ive gotten myself in over my head atleast in regards to how long it will take to finish everything solo.
 

rIKmAN

Member
Love the art style, but the mismatched perspective of the room and items on the second image does funny things to my brain!.

Keep up the good work.
 

asollazzo

Member
Love the art style, but the mismatched perspective of the room and items on the second image does funny things to my brain!.

Keep up the good work.
Yup that perspective is definitely wonky but was going for something along the lines of the nes/snes zelda games, i originally had it in correct orthographic projection but it somehow seemed weird gameplay wise to not be able to see all sides of a room and also sometimes enemies could hide behind foreground walls a little too much. Maybe ill have to figure out something in between the 2 styles.
 

asollazzo

Member
So ive added an idle animation for the character for him facing forward and back. Do you guys think its needed to add some kind of transition animation between when you look from left to right and from up to down ?

idle2.gif
 

CMAllen

Member
Love the art style, but the mismatched perspective of the room and items on the second image does funny things to my brain!.

Keep up the good work.
There's a definite mismatch for the perspectives. The character is nearly profile, straight on. One room is pseudo-topdown (like old-school Zelda games). And the other room is angled downward. They all look great, but they're also inconsistent. Not a bad thing. But it'd be ideal if your character art adapts to these differing perspectives. Which would actually be kind of cool.
 

asollazzo

Member
There's a definite mismatch for the perspectives. The character is nearly profile, straight on. One room is pseudo-topdown (like old-school Zelda games). And the other room is angled downward. They all look great, but they're also inconsistent. Not a bad thing. But it'd be ideal if your character art adapts to these differing perspectives. Which would actually be kind of cool.
The character was designed to pseudo match the grassy concept image at the top, most of the game will be in that perspective, i wanted to do interiors but also have all the interior walls visible so i thought it was an ok compromise. Id love to have the character be able to change perspective per scene too but it will have to come later on in development i think since that would require redrawing all the character art/animations :)

Anyways heres something new to look at :

knocked.gif
 
D

Deleted member 16767

Guest
I like the interior. But all of the art is really at the top.
 

asollazzo

Member
Made some progress getting the movement animation and code abit smoother (i had some issue with camera moving before/after the character that was making the movement a little jerky but fixed now). Also reworked the footstep animation and added some extra dust when you roll (looks a little funny in low framerate gifs, if anyone has advice on some better format for showing motion than gif let me know !).



Also finished up the art for another weapon, there will be a wide range of weapons from different time periods :) Just posting now i noticed a depth issue with the player beam going under the bot's shadow heh. Any Spine gods around that know if its possible to draw a single spine slot at a different depth to the rest easily ?

 
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CMAllen

Member
Made some progress getting the movement animation and code abit smoother (i had some issue with camera moving before/after the character that was making the movement a little jerky but fixed now). Also reworked the footstep animation and added some extra dust when you roll (looks a little funny in low framerate gifs, if anyone has advice on some better format for showing motion than gif let me know !).



Also finished up the art for another weapon, there will be a wide range of weapons from different time periods :) Just posting now i noticed a depth issue with the player beam going under the bot's shadow heh. Any Spine gods around that know if its possible to draw a single spine slot at a different depth to the rest easily ?

I'm going to guess that you'll have to do a second draw function specifically for the shadows so that they are sorted at the same 'depth' below other non-terrain sprites/tiles.
 

asollazzo

Member
I'm going to guess that you'll have to do a second draw function specifically for the shadows so that they are sorted at the same 'depth' below other non-terrain sprites/tiles.
Yup i was planning to have the shadows controlled within spine to have them match the animations but i guess i can make all the non player characters just draw their own shadow via gms.

Nice animations! How can you point the gun like you did using Spine?
In spine i have a bone that sits where the gun will be, the gun is attached to that and also the 2 ik for the hands to make the arms follow the gun. The gun bone also has an ik controlling it so when u set the position of that ik in gms to follow the cursor the gun/hands also follow :)


Your animations are looking great, I'm so jealous haha.
That energy beam looks sooo good too. I love a good energy beam.
Thanks :)
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
In spine i have a bone that sits where the gun will be, the gun is attached to that and also the 2 ik for the hands to make the arms follow the gun. The gun bone also has an ik controlling it so when u set the position of that ik in gms to follow the cursor the gun/hands also follow :)
Wow, thanks! I knew nothing about it. It's an iteresting reading and will help a lot on my next games. Thanks! =]

Keep up the good work on Kittaria! Animations are amazing!
 

Kezarus

Endless Game Maker
Wow, awesome effects. Love the "charging" like effect. Pawn fingers lighting up, a circle completing. Very nice.

Yep, the flame paw is pretty much visible. =]
 

rIKmAN

Member
So i took the advice of some of you guys about the wonky perspective of the interiors and redid the art/camera angle, also implemented a very simple lighting system :)

Youtube quaity is abit blurry but owell.

That looks so much better with the new perspective in my opinion, my brain approves of the change! Haha.

That really is some high quality artwork, very nice!
 
S

spoonsinbunnies

Guest
I literally signed in just to say how much I love the art of this, keep up the good work.
 

asollazzo

Member
Yet another new weapon added, will probably switch over to doing some level art next just to have more variety to show :)


Would love some feedback, positive or negative is fine !
 

asollazzo

Member
Seems im stuck making items for now. New one that is meant as a homage of sorts to the snes zelda sword with some added fancyness. Not entirely happy with the sword trail i created, it doesnt really smoothly fade between steps, so if anyone has advice on how to create a juicy one let me know :) (drew a primitive between the end of the sword and tip and their respective positions on the previous step)

 

asollazzo

Member

Looking for some feedback/suggestions on how to handle interactions, such as opening doors or chests etc. Right now i have a very basic placeholder popup that shows you can interact and the button to press. It works but it looks sorta silly since its either going to cover up whatever you interact with or if placed above wont work especially well with tall objects such as this door.

EDIT : Updated it abit, put a basic glowy outline on the door to indicate it can be interacted with, not sure if thats enough, might still need some text ?

 
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asollazzo

Member
So im working on exterior stuff some more and have implemented some shadows with the usual drawing to a surface method and drawing the surface at reduced alpha. Im drawing the shadows under all the props (fences, house, character etc) otherwise there is depth issues. What i want to do is somehow if an instance is within the shadow area it will draw itself darker than usual, just not sure how to do it with my current setup.

shadows.jpg
 

asollazzo

Member
Been a little while since an update, implemented some more bush variations and have them moving based off the global windspeed, clouds do the same. Also a new ground texture and a basic path. Some other stuff too but was mostly fixing up my terrible code heh.

 

asollazzo

Member
So i havent posted here in a while, but im looking to get a few people to run a small build of my game to see how it performs on a variety of pcs. It may crash and have a millions bugs, especially relating to movement since im currently messing around with controller support but im just looking for what number shows in the debug message in the top left corner. Any help would be great :) So anyone willing to help please grab this zipfile http://www.alexsollazzo.com/Cat_Defense.zip and run the game and let me know what fps you get and your vague pc specs.

Thanks !

Oh if this is against the forum rules or anything, please delete this or let me know and i will :)
 
M

mamacato

Guest
This is amazing work! Those chickens are the cutest things I've seen in a long while. The animations are impressive. I like the glow around the door. The attack and teleport effects look like they could be in a grade A game. Your work looks very promising. I love the details put into the cat's animation.

You asked for negative feedback. From what you've shown us, everything looks pretty polished. So can't say much. The sword attack animation is a bit awkward. It's not a natural way to slash with a sword. I wonder if you thought of it too.

One final thing and this is just a personal preference, and I don't even know if something can be done about it. Spine animations (animating using Spine) look awkward to me. They feel cheap to me. They remind me of browser flash games I used to play many years ago now. It wouldn't stop me from wanting to play your game, but I thought I'd mention it just to see what you think. Your game in no way looks cheap though. This is definitely quality work!
 

asollazzo

Member
Thanks ! The sword animation is definitely a little wonky looking and something i probably need to revisit, it can just be a little hard to get a spine animation setup to look good when it needs to attack at different angles etc. Spine stuff can for sure look cheap because if you put in the least amount of work in spine the animations are basically just bits of the sprite rotating/moving (as opposed to drawing each frame manually where you have full control of the look). I tried to add deformation and alot of secondary motion to hide the limitations of a skeletal based animation system, the next step would be to draw extra sprite parts to use in an attack or something to emphasize certain motions and not just look like hey this cats are is rotating :)
 

Eran_Mi

Member
WOW, looks great. very nice to the progression from post to post, the art and animation look so professional. to me it looks like a cool studio Nintendo game.
 
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