let's get crackin'

hi, i'm drak! i'm making a cute platform game about an egg. it's still very early in development, so anything seen here is far from final. 『Ｐｌｅａｓｅ　Ｕｎｄｅｒｓｔａｎｄ』. twitter ・ main tumblr ・ art blog ask ・ faq

[drakdraws]

support drak on patreon!!

i started a patreon!!! if you want to support me making Ridiculous Video Games, please consider signal boosting or pledging (〃´ ∇` )

thank you!!!!

[hatchlinghero]

also, for fun! the animation on the left was drawn in flipnote studio 3d on my 3ds a little over a year ago!!! YOU'VE COME FAR, EGGDRAKE

[hatchlinghero]

i spent a while tonight fixing up drake form's run animation! it's back on-model and i'm really happy with it. i also added in a transition from standing/walking to running (and vice versa), so ground movement looks pretty smooth now. next task is jumping and falling! i got started on that tonight, but i'm outta steam, so! i'll save the rest for tomorrow.

one lil conundrum i'm gonna have to deal with: i'd love to have a satisfying two-or-three frame squish delay before a jump, but i dunno! having a delay before a jump can be good for ~game feel~ if you've got a nice animation for it, but it can also feel limiting! i'll hafta toy with it and see how it feels.

WELL, BYE!!!

[hatchlinghero]

Oh wow! The Fire Animation for the fire dude looks absolutely superb. Do you think you could explain (or just reference the thing that taught you how) how best to achieve something like that?

wah, thank you so much!!!

so! i kinda went from 0 to 60 in a couple hours as far as figuring out How To Flame. i was watchin youtube videos of slow motion campires and stuff and just, like, not understanding it at all. then a friend of mine explained it to me as “basically it’s like a flag waving upward”, and for some reason that made it click? like, if you turn a flame on its side, each side should be kind of a wave motion, and it should kinda “wag” back and forth at the tip for a nice loop. that’s… the vague idea i started with, and after a while of fiddling in photoshop, i got something that i think looks kinda nice!

it’s kinda lazy, but here’s a screenshot of my frames, if that helps you at all!

[battlejenkins-old]

(crashes through a wall of empty soda cans) The flame is a separate sprite layered over the ember character’s body! It’s set to the ‘additive’ blend mode (also known as the ‘screen’ layer blending mode in Photoshop), which adds the RGB values of the flame’s graphics to the graphics below it, which is what gives it its brightening effect!

[hatchlinghero]

OH YEAH I DIDNT TALK ABOUT THE GLOW AT ALL yeah. it's got the additive blending mode active ~PLUS~ horizontal + vertical glow effects which are WebGL shader things available in construct 2! without the blend/glow effects, the graphics look as flat as they do in the frame image up there.

[hatchlinghero]

Oh wow! The Fire Animation for the fire dude looks absolutely superb. Do you think you could explain (or just reference the thing that taught you how) how best to achieve something like that?

wah, thank you so much!!!

so! i kinda went from 0 to 60 in a couple hours as far as figuring out How To Flame. i was watchin youtube videos of slow motion campires and stuff and just, like, not understanding it at all. then a friend of mine explained it to me as “basically it’s like a flag waving upward”, and for some reason that made it click? like, if you turn a flame on its side, each side should be kind of a wave motion, and it should kinda “wag” back and forth at the tip for a nice loop. that’s… the vague idea i started with, and after a while of fiddling in photoshop, i got something that i think looks kinda nice!

it’s kinda lazy, but here’s a screenshot of my frames, if that helps you at all!

[hatchlinghero]

phew! it's been a while since i've done drake graphics, so these new ones look kinda off-model! whoops!!

i'm gonna be working on fleshing out drake's missing animations this week! i'm starting with a proper dash animation.

also, all drake's graphics sprites are kinda much smaller ingame than they're meant to be, so that fix'll come up soon too... he was the first character i did graphics for, so he was kind of a test bed for a lot of things!

also here's a lil gif of ember coolin off in the shallows, just because.

[hatchlinghero]

hello hello!! i was away for a little but now i'm back and it's time for egg stuff. today i learned how to animate fire!!! i'm.. gonna be needing to do a lot of that.....

[hatchlinghero]

ok im

done now

bye

[hatchlinghero]

one more, because i can't stop being excited about water

[hatchlinghero]

WHOOPS YOU GET A THIRD POST TODAY BECAUSE I JUST FIGURED OUT I CAN DO THIS AND IT LOOKS REALLY COOL

[hatchlinghero]

oh yeah, one more fun lil image. here's a zoomed out view of my test cave, home to water currents and bomb blocks!

[hatchlinghero]

no gifs today, just still images! i'm working on putting in some new hi-res level tiles with the proper viewing angle worked out. these are still placeholders... but it's certainly closer to the target visual style than the old test tileset!

[hatchlinghero]

and here's a second gif that turned out too big for tumblr - whoops!

i put in some bomb blocks last night! they work p much like the ones in [coughs, looks around the room, loosens collar] the kirby games, except they're activated with a switch rather than another destructible block. the switch can be placed anywhere (so not necessarily right next to the blocks) and tied to any number of blocks. once a block starts burstin', it'll cause a chain reaction in every direction around it. this makes for a lot of different possible block breakdown configurations!

FUN STUFF

[hatchlinghero]

today you get a youtube video!!! i've been working on water mechanics a bunch lately. i'm just about finished with strong underwater currents!

[hatchlinghero]

also: these two gifs were too big to upload to tumblr directly so i'm linkin em from offsite. THEY'RE GOODIES THOUGH

[hatchlinghero]

hey there!!! i got a bunch of stuff done tonight, but none of it's really exciting to talk about so have a pile of completely contextless gifs!!!

[hatchlinghero]

SO! this effect isn't 100% finished yet, but tonight i added an indicator for whether or not an enemy is carrying an element! for some reason, the pulse effect isn't showing up super great in that particular gif. in game, it looks a little more like this:

yowza!!! get a load'a that pulse pig!!!!

seek out elements and claim em as your own!!!

in the final game, different enemy types will carry different elements. beast-type enemies will carry beast element, fire-type enemies will carry fire element, and so on. however, not every enemy is elemental! otherwise you'd end up spawning powerups left and right with every enemy you kill. elemental foes will be peppered throughout stages in places that make sense, a little bit like traditional powerups in a platformer!

bonus horrible accident gif: