Finding a path
Two posts in and I’m already displeased with every post being “Weekly Roundup”, so I’ll drop that part and try and come up with a clever title for each one (see, “finding a path” is clever because I’ve been working on path finding algorithms, but also I’m finding a path to writing more blog stuff. No? Nevermind.)
RPG
RPG (still a working title)
The Wizard protagonist is just a placeholder at the moment. RPG will be a sort of survival/RPG hybrid and you’ll start off as a normal human, but there’s a lot of engine work that still needs to be done, so I created a simple 4-frame walk animation for my wizard stand-in (y’know, instead of doing the engine work…):
Which looks quite cute (if small!)
I bought Aseprite this week after playing with the demo a bit, so I was able to use it to create the animation frames and I have to say I really like it. It has a quiet power that doesn’t get in the way. Previously I’ve been using Adobe Fireworks, which I like, but it’s so not designed for pixel art - no preview window for starters!
This paragraph was supposed to be all about how I plumbed in the path finding to make the wizard actually move, but it doesn’t, because I didn’t. Next week!
New Lessons - Logo & Scratch Racing
I added a new Logo project to my lessons site. This one started life as a word document and I didn’t have the screenshots anymore, so I had to save them out of the word doc which lost some quality. It was originally a little Year 7 filler lesson, but I quite like it and it ended up being useful with a few other groups too.
Scratch Racing is a funky project for making a little top-down racing game. I had to re-shoot all of the screenshots to match up with Scratch 2 as I originally made this project some time ago using the old version which looks really different.
I have about 3 or 4 more ‘old’ projects that I want to consolidate like this. Once that’s done I need to write a whole bunch more for next year!
Jumpy
I started writing this post on Monday and set out all the headings and stuff so I knew what I needed to write about. I very nearly deleted the “other project 2” heading, because I didn’t think I had another project in me this week. Then I came out of meeting with Old, Friendly “Oh crap, I completely forgot I needed to do that for next week” and Jumpy was born.
I needed a project for an induction lesson I’m teaching next week. It’s a terrible platform game engine, but, but, but, it only uses Tkinter which is important because it needs to work with stock Python without the ability to install fancy packages for working with images or drawing fancy sprites!
Working within these kinds of limitations is a vastly underrated skill in my job!
I made a cute little file icon too:
This all took quite a bit of time and marks an important milestone: I actually up and moved to Python 3, which took more effort to get installed on my work machine than I care to mention. Technically I got paid to write a game, so I’m an actual game developer now. Sweet! See also how I reused my wizard sprite from above? Completely justifies the time I spent on Tuesday working on him!