31/3/15 - Whack-a-Mole no more!

I've likened my problems in Unity to Whack-a-Mole.

When one problem goes down, another pops up.

So here's what's happened so far:

***Problems working out how big the sprites are when imported into Unity***

Cheating with a sized box around each sprite won't work - it's a case of going into photoshop, cropping it down to the pixel, and dividing the dimensions by how many sprites are across/down

***Problems with sprites not lining up***

That's a case for pivots, and not sprite sizes, as I initially thought.

***Assorted coding issues***

For whatever reason, I missed whole lines of code. I don't know how. The secondary issues were missing curly brackets and capital letters where they were/weren't supposed to be

***Jumping***

Turns out, I had my gravity on waaaaaaaay too high. The next problem was getting the animation to play properly when she falls. That was just trial and error.

But guess what?

I've done it!... For now at least. 

I've got a minor issue going on with the camera tracking, but I'm pretty sure this is easily sorted out with a bit of code that keeps the Y axis fixed. I'm not a coder, so this'll take a bit of research, or some help with someone in the know.

Ahhh. The sense of accomplishment is overwhelming right now.

23/3/15 - I owe you some progress

From my last post a few weeks ago, I've been trying to get things to work in Unity.

Here's what I've got so far!

And sweet baby jesus has this taken a long time to do.

I've had such a problem with sprites. I never would have guessed that would be my biggest problem.

My first problem was getting everything to slice nicely so I didn't get a jiggly frame without guesswork. With the help of Wayne Peters, a game art tutor, I've managed to get that bit down! Great!

Problem two was an issue with the code. I followed this tutorial, and for whatever reason, I could swear on my life code just kept appearing out of nowhere. Thankfully, I have my talented brother to help me see where I'm going wrong - hint: It was capital letters, lower case letters, wiggly brackets and semi-colons.

So! All coded up, and problem three is again an issue with the sprites. As you can see from the video, there's a nasty jump there between an idle animation and the run. I'd wager it's because the sprites aren't the same dimensions.

Either way, enjoy my progress and look out for more stuff. I might need to change that picture on the banner, I'm not going to have much hair left once this software has made me pull it all out.

24/2/15 - More Animation

Time has flown by this week. I've no excuse for not posting other than that I honestly lost track of days.

Firstly, the run is near enough finished (to a point that I'm happy with). The trouble with my references was that I hadn't bounded like the run is supposed to, so I didn't get the cape right. In my video, where it was a light jog, it was a little swish from left to right - so the cape swish that worked well in the jog didn't transfer over properly to the bound.

There's a good chance that the cape might be too heavy on the way down, but at least it doesn't look like a solid object now!

Secondly, there's an idle animation done now. This is for when there's a period of inactivity. I started with a longer arm swing, but was told to shorten it by Callum. 

16/2/15 - Princess Pants Logo

Howdy howdy howdy.

Today, I've been working on a logo for the game.

I've been inspired by the Fat Princess logo, Candy Crush,  and assorted bubble fonts, and superhero-esque typefaces. I had a look for princess fonts, but dear lord, they are woeful, and inappropriate for everything but headers.

I had a bit of trouble deciding what sort of look to go for, and after a bit of trial and error, I took inspiration from all sorts of places and came out with this.

Personally, I like the Princess bit, but I'm not hot on the "pants". I feel like that's a bit unreadable. 

Fun fact - today I learnt how to mask in Illustrator. I always love learning new things about that software.

14/02/15 - Princess Pants has a cape!

Today, I've been working on Princess Pants' cape. There's some overlapping action in the cape knot, but this needs work and it's just a basic thing at the moment. I've been looking at my own running reference, but I feel like I might need to be running on the treadmill to get the run right, as my own is more of a jog than a bound.

Looking at it, the cape definitely needs to be higher up for longer. That's for tomorrow!

Lastly, Happy Valentine's Day! Here's a picture of Princess Pants and Carrot the Rat having a cuddle. Remember to tell everyone that means something to you "I love you."Valentine's day is for loving everyone, including yourself, so make yourself a nice meal and put your feet up for the day.

From here on in, the work on the Princess Pants Facebook Page is going to be completely different to the blog, so be sure to head on over there from time to time. 

12/2/15 - Princess Pants run

Today I've been working on backgrounds and Princess Pants' run cycle. It's not yet finished - there's definitely some things that need refining, and there's a cape that needs adding, but here's the work from today/yesterday!

This is the first run cycle I made, using the legs from the previous post. Julia Young pointed out to me that perhaps it was a bit fast, so I added some frames in.

This is the slower bounding run. It's animated on twos, and is a total of 24 frames.

08/2/15 - Run Cycles

I've been a bit inactive as of late, and that's down to doing my dissertation. For the love of God, I hope to never write another essay for as long as I live.

I've been itching to get started on production, and today after my marathon shift at work, I've started some run cycles. Here are my first couple of attempts.

Now this first one was done by looking at a reference sheet, and making similar poses. I only did one side for quickness, so I don't really care about it at this point, I'm just getting some basic looks done.

This one here was exaggerating the first one. I didn't really like this one to be honest.

In between the last one and here, I decided to give the bone tool a shot for quickness. I was really struggling with the legs drawn by hand, and, so I wanted something a little speedy. I actually quite like the look of how this is going.

This was a happy accident. I went to loop the top one again, and accidentally chose only half of it. Now it's quite an animated, jumpy run. Imagine that's fully done, again, these are only in halves just to see how it'll look quickly and save my time. I'm not a lazybones, I just work efficiently.

This is a continuation from the one up there. I decided I'd give it a go, and actually fill in the legs over the top.

This one is more or less the same as the one up there, except I deleted every other frame to work on twos. I don't like how this one looks so much, so if I choose to work on twos, I'm going to have to have a look at re-doing the shapes.

Well, I hope you've enjoyed today's post.

I done a dumb and forgot to save what was driving me so crazy. I'd had one leg done really nicely, but whenever I tried to add the other leg, it just looked wrong. Thank Ra and all the other Gods for the bone tool.

02/2/15 - Princess Pants Mega Post.

Some new stuff, some old stuff. Enjoy!

28/01/15 - An animated Turnaround.

Hi folks. Today, my wonderful boyfriend pointed out that, for a side on platformer game, I didn't have a side view. I done a dumb.

So, I've taken it one further, and I've turned it into a turnaround .gif, with all the frames I was missing before.

It's a little grainy, I have no idea how to fix that. I've heard it's something to do with the colours that a .gif can handle. If you know how to fix it, please let me know! Enjoy!

Ps. She must get pretty dizzy spinning around all day.

24/1/15 - Night-time scenery revised

Some of you might remember this from a previous post.

So I've revised this and put it into Illustrator to make this one! I'm missing the texture, but I really quite like the way it looks. Plus, I can make it any size I want. I might find something nice to overlay on the top.