Gamedev,

I'm really excited about the progress I'm making on the project. Alright, so first of all I got an artist for the project. His name is Bruce, he is pretty 1337. We've settled on this as the final sprite for his standing position:



Isn't he great? Bruce is working on his running animation now, and soon I'll be able to really see him in action. As for actuall progress on my end of the bargain, I have some really exciting material! Whoo hoo! I've officially made a giant leap into making the game actually run in a linear fashion! I have transition screens which look like this...



...between each level. On the right we have text (which you can move up and down with the arrow keys), on the top left we have a city map and a little icon to show where you art (the map right now is colorful because I made it quickly in paint), and on the bottom left we have a small mini-screenie of the level to show players what they might be dealing with. Then you press enter to move on. There is now one preceeding each of the first three levels.

This is awesome, because this means that the next step is first of all programming the first boss fight (which should be an interesting new experiment). Then I get to work on animating everything, because by this time Bruce will have some frames ready for the job. At the same time, I will begin to design the next three level (plus boss fight), which should take less time because I A) Know what I'm doing and B) Already have the code structure lain out.

After that, I'm going to experiment with a few more enemy types, fine tune the collision detection, design the rest of the game, and then have a ball working with the artists and sound engineers. Yay!

Oh man, my dreams are coming together before my eyes. I am now certain we can have the project done before November 15th.. which is the happy deadline of IGF Student Showcase nominations.

Whoo hoo, more as soon as possible.

-IV