I was showing someone some of my old games the other day and I came across an early build of Udo, before it got too complicated.

I thought to myself, "What the hell am I doing, giving up on this?". Udo was turning out fun to play, was being well recieved by you lot and was a big step towards a dream I've always had to write a really good 2D platformer.

So, with fanfares and so on, Udo is back.

(For those of you wondering what I am on about, this was the most recent active project in my journal, although it is going back a bit).

I've decided to start from scratch (although obviously I have all the graphics I've done already, so that is a big load off) since the code base got a bit unmanagable towards the end.

So I've got as far tonight as a very basic framework that allows for swapping between different game modes (just different coloured screens at the moment), restoring lost devices and a nice messaging system that supports delayed messages and messages that can be either globally handled or passed along to the current mode. This system worked well on the last attempt at this game so why mend what is not broken?

For those of you who have forgotten, here are some of the characters and items for the game. These are all hand-drawn and hand-animated in Paint Shop Pro and it is a bit of a time-consuming process for a non-artist.

Udo

Sheep

Fish

Star

Quite tired since I've been driving all over the south east of England today for work so no more activity tonight. Next step is to implement resolution switching, since I think it is good to get these things working before the actual game stuff begins in earnest otherwise they tend to come back later and bite me in the bum.

I really need to work on making the level file formats a bit simpler than last time round, since they got a bit crazy really. My Map application for putting levels together is a behemoth these days. Perhaps that could use a rewrite.

I think I need to hard-code a bit more stuff into the game than before. Stuff that will never change from level to level, like Udo's graphics and animations, really has no place in the level files.

Lots of ideas to mull over. 3D graphics can wait until this project is properly finished and I can hold up my head with pride.

[Irrelevant personal notes: New job still going very well and all seems pretty good with the girlfriend again].

EDIT - By the way, can anyone recommend me a really good free pixel-art based paint package that has good support for doing and testing animations? With Paint Shop, I have to draw the frames by hand, then export into Animation Shop before I can see what they look like animated.

If I could write my dream paint package, it would have the pixel art features of Paint Shop, along with the groovy gradient fills and arbitrary selections and so on, but allow me to have multiple frames per image that I could cycle through with like Tab and Ctrl-Tab or something and a thumbnail view that always showed my image at normal size regardless of the zoom of the canvas I'm working on.

Anything like that available does anyone know? I have attempted Googlejitsu but don't seem to be having much luck.