It's vacation time, and that means time to get some serious work done. I've done bug fixing a few days ago, mostly because my brothers playtested my game for me and found some weirdness that had popped up in parts of the game I hadn't played in ages. Fixed it easily enough. Then I worked on finishing my model for my game. It needed tweaking, and it definitely needed a new skeleton. I had armatures wrapping around the spring, which meant 20 per arm (yikes!) Now the springs have less vertices (they're being subsurfaced slightly) and use weighted values to join them to bones, so now I can get away with 2 bones instead of 20. MUCH easier to animate. Here's a big still of The Mighty Stoopid running around like he's an airplane:



Today I actually started animating the skeleton. Among other things, I got a pretty good running animation out of him:



Looks sweet in-game. And if you're going to tell me he runs like a retard ... I know. That was intentional.

I'm going to work on more animations tomorrow, If I can finish the skidding, jumping, and falling, I'll be able to run through most levels without seeing my programmer's art sprites at all! Yay!

This will also mean that by finishing all the sprites, I'll also finish implementing the new combat system. Then I can make enemies with a little more confidence. I think this will be a major milestone, one that really opens the way to getting more of the other parts of the game finished. Hopefully I'll have all the player sprites finished well before end of holidays.

EDIT: More fun: