Comatour DevLog 2 – Getting Into The Juice
4/9/2022
Hello all! Welcome back to the DevLog!
To start, I should quickly explain the lack of a DevLog last week. Simply put, I had a bit of traveling to do, which fell on last Saturday. Normally, I would have made a post the following day, but I ended up being busy for a good stretch of a few days around last Saturday, resulting in me only getting in about a week’s worth of work done in the last two weeks.
So, I decided to just delay until this DevLog. Now, with that out of the way, let’s get into it.
Over the past couple weeks, I’ve done a bit of work on the protag’s design: I changed the shirt from a T-shirt to a sleeveless one, to make the arm movements easier to read. Also, I decide to slightly change the perspective to better show when characters face diagonally.
After that was done, I got to work making the running animations for the 8 different directions. Though it took me a couple days, I’m happy with how they turned out. Not only is the new perspective easier to read at a glance, it’s also easier to animate in.
As you may have noticed, the running animations keep the hands relatively still. This is to make the next thing I had to do easier: prepare the player character to hold items.
To elaborate: In Comatour, the items you have equipped are shown on the character in-game. Though it’ll be more difficult to implement than just a standard sprite, I have a few reasons for wanting it this way:
- First, and most simply, it’s cool. I just think equipping an item and seeing it on the character is neat.
- Second, it adds character to the run. Part of the idea behind Comatour is that each run isn’t just a game session, but rather a story. It all takes place on one giant map that the player will have to explore in order to progress the run. The choices made and actions taken by the player will have lasting consequences throughout the map. And the story you make is further anchored by the unique look your character has due to the items you got/needed.
- Third, and most important, shown items make the game more readable. Whether it be in a PvP scenario, or a simple PvE situation: knowing what an enemy is capable of at a glance is invaluable.
Aside from the inside of the bag, the player has 2 main inventory slots: the held item and the holstered item. The player can quickly swap between the two, giving them a bit more flexibility in tense situations.
As you may have guessed, the held item is shown in the player’s hand, and the holstered item hands off the side of the bag.
Now, in order to make this work, I basically went through the character sprites and set ever-changing X and Y coordinates to track both the hand and the bag. Then, from there, it’s simply a matter of making sure the items track properly and actually occupy the correct inventory slot.
Here’s a quick test video of the item-holding system in action:
There is a bit more to it than what I explained, but in a nutshell, that’s what I’ve gotten done in the past couple weeks. I may end up missing the next DevLog (4/16/2022) since I’m still in a different state, but rest assured that I am still working on the game.
Now, I believe that’s it for this DevLog. I’ll see y’all in the next one!