Dev log #1 | 360 degree character (Patreon)

Hey y'all! It's time for an update on my second TG game. 'The Changing Prisoner's Dilemma'

From now on, my programmer Alice will write the devlogs every month as she is more involved in the process. So enjoy her introduction!

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As you might have surmised from this introduction. I am in fact not Nathan. You can call me Alice. Some of us may have met before. I am a good friend of Nathans and the main programmer on this new game.

Nathan and I have been working on this game for a while. In fact on this day it has been nine months to the day. As such we have a lot of stuff to show and Nathan has finally agreed to show some of it off! That is why I am writing y'all this devlog. I hope you will enjoy the little sneak peaks as much as i have enjoyed writing and coding for this game

First off, some context. This game is very different from Bimbo Blaster (which we are also still working on). For one, you can move around in three-dimensional space. However, Nathan does not really do 3D art, so we had a problem. How do we make 2D characters appear 3D?

Nathan came up with a rather intelligent solution. Using the same principles he uses in his animations and drawings, he created multiple perspectives of each character from different view angles.

However, that is not all there is to it. If we swapped images on a whim, it would be really jarring whenever the player looked at them.

So we ensure the image is always orientated to the player and switch to another view when a threshold angle has been reached. This does not create a seamless transition, however, as you can see here from one of the characters in the game. However, it is a rather pleasing effect still.

There were off course a few challenges to this wholes system. Each with a separate and unique solution. The biggest one being

Performance: How do we make sure that this system is efficient?

• Problem: The original script made by Nathan had the sprites updated every single frame. Which caused a lot of performance issues with getting the images again every single frame

• Solution: We implemented a system where we saved the last angle as an index and only swapped the sprites when we actually swapped to another index

The best part of this whole new system. If we wanna add more angles to a character. It is entirely possible to do so with 0 code changes! So that makes my work very easy. Nathan's work, however. Well, minor spoiler. But every angle for a character has to have about 8 unique sprites at the least. So a lot of work for him.

Now, if you want to contact me to ask questions about the game, you can do so in one of two ways. (I cannot share a lot, though. It's still very secret.)

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I hope you all enjoyed this first-ever devlog! I hope to do a lot, in any case, so this is definitely not the last you will see of me. Future devlogs may improve as well since this is still my first-ever one. But we have a lot of systems in place already and a lot for me to talk about. Anyway, see you all next month, folks!

Leave a comment on the devlogs posts (I shall respond as Tracker124)

Ask me questions in the discord. 'TGedNathansDomain!' where I shall respond to questions at least once a week. You can find me there as @kinggo14