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SoCoder -> Blogs Home -> Blogs

 
HoboBen
Created : 21 December 2008
 
System : Mac

WIP Platformer
Replaying Commander Keen again, I decided I just had to start working on a platformer game myself.

Course, I've made several attempts before, but I can never be bothered to draw & animate the player and all the bad guys!

So I decided to get the computer to do all the work and generate the characters itself, and have animations be a simple matter of getting the program to rotate each limb.

So with simple bitmap images of legs, arms and heads, and a few lines of text describing how each piece slots together, the computer paints each limb with a randomly chosen texture. It reeks of MSPaint, but it works!



The program itself hasn't got any concept of how to put a person together, so the same little text files describing each limb can be used to add all sorts of monsters and baddies just as easily.

Next up: actually recording & playing animations!

 

Comments
Sunday, 21 December 2008, 08:48
Jayenkai
 		Hehe.. I love that look! It'll be like Pigeon Street the Video Game!!
Sunday, 21 December 2008, 16:32
blanko1324
 		Hah, they're great looking. I think the noses give them the most character.
Monday, 22 December 2008, 01:33
shroom_monk
 		Wow... those actually look pretty good! What I would say though is that on quite a few of them the head looks slightly out-of-proportion to the rest of the body.
Tuesday, 23 December 2008, 19:37
mindstorm8191
 		Hey, I think they look great. Better to look MS Paint-ish than to have nothing at all! You can always improve on your graphics later.
Wednesday, 24 December 2008, 03:06
HoboBen
 		Thanks for the comments guys

I made an attempt at creating an older, fatter Commander Keen. I'm considering having him as the main character, or at least making an appearance at some point in the game.



In terms of the gameplay, I was thinking of doing something similar to the Thing-Thing flash games, with plenty of Keen-style jumping puzzles.