Dear game developers,

I am quite happy because I have recently finished the drawing of the last sprite I wanted to add to Plee the Bear. It was this beautiful pink flower :



To create this beautiful flower, I started from a 50% gray layer in GIMP in which I quickly drew the volumes using a black or white paintbrush. Then I added tint areas for each part of the drawing (petals and pistil) that I combined with the volumes by applying a "soft light" mode to the latter. In a second 50% gray layer combined in "soft light" mode, I drew the edges of the petals with a white paintbrush in order to emphasis them. Finally I applied a yellow airbrush in "addition" mode to contrast the whole thing. Neat, isn't it?



This work is a partial result of the ongoing fundraising campaign for the game. The finalization of this task has a special meaning; it means that I can now begin the clean up process: I remove the old sprites, I edit the levels to adjust their structure and the decorations, then I will be able to package the game and to share it.

About the graphics, apart this new flower and the fresh decorations you can see on the first screen shot, I ave also reworked the animations of the player walking, running and slapping:





In terms of game play, the main character is now more easily controlled, especially because his speed has been greatly reduced. Also, the first levels are more simple, less intricate, but still have as many secret places. See for example the structure of the very first level (the player is under the little red arrow):



In the previous releases of the game we had several problems with the inclined grounds: either the player couldn't climb, or was sliding on it, or climbing backwards, or he was running without moving…. At the time we met these problems, we found a workaround by using some magic numbers and half-assed computation of the forces. It was a bit shameful… Well, good news everyone!, all this crap has been removed! The smelly tricks are over, now the reaction of the ground follows the laws of physics and this is the main character who adjusts his force according to the angle of the ground on which he is.

Another constraint of the slopes used in the previous release of the game was that they had to be necessarily straight. Well, as a side effect of the integration of the work done on Andy's Super Great Park, you will have in the next release some beautiful slopes whose surfaces are defined by a Bézier curve. As a result, the behavior of the main character when he goes from one ground to another is smoother and it is visually really nicer!

Aside of this I have also worked on the documentation of the engine of the game and I have started a series of simple examples targeted to guide the user into taking the tools in hand. The approach is completely different of what I did before. While I wanted to write complete and precise technical documentations before, emphasizing the level editor, character editor and animation editors, I decided to tackle the problem in a different way by writing short programs to show that the engine is easy to use even without the additional tools. Thus the new developer is now accompanied in the documentation into creating his first window, displaying a rectangle, then a sprite, a text with a true type font, reading the keyboard, the mouse and the joystick, playing a music and some sounds, playing an animation, apply a fragment shader and more coming soon.

For the developers already at ease in the development and who want to start immediately in the game, I have also created a project wizard for Linux distributions which downloads the engine, creates a tree structure with the minimal content for a project, then compiles and runs it. The archive of the wizard is also available out of git

Here it is! I hope I will be able to provide a build of the game the next time

You can download the previous version, with all the problems mentioned above, on SourceForge.net.