My apologies for the lateness, but I was recently simultaneously afflicted with both strep throat and jury duty.  That was a fun combination.  On to the screenshots!

While the textures are basic for now, I have implemented dynamic lighting and particles in the stage loading and drawing pipelines.  The sconces contain tiny licking flames, and the stage is overlaid with an ambient color that is modulated with radiant lights, such as the sconce light sources which provide a soft flickering red-orange.

The shadows are dynamically cast, in this case using a large, soft light source centered on the player for testing.  Eventually, I will probably relegate shadow casting to environmental lighting, certain enemies,  gunshot flashes, and some special effects I won’t reveal just yet.

Been working simultaneously on bullet and particle systems.  Here’s a peak at what they look like combined so far!

I’ve moved on to working on the enemy system including bullet mechanics, and I thought it might be fun to start with a boss battle, so here’s a quick concept of one boss.

For years now, I’ve been using an old Wacom Intuos tablet.  It’s served me well all these years, until I finally realized that the technology had grown far beyond the meager capabilities of the original.

So I gave in and bought myself a shiny new Wacom Intuos 4 medium tablet, and I have the say, the difference is incredible.  The increased levels of pressure sensitivity and update latency really feel substantial.

As such, I thought I’d try out some sketching and inking, and here’s what I’ve got so far, a quick bust of Emaline.  After this, I’ll take to shading, although I haven’t decided if I should work more on cel-style or airbrush style.  Coloring was never my strongest suit, and I sadly lack practice in the area.  Hopefully the new tablet will finally get me to change that.

Here it is, the first glimpse of the graphical style of Scale.  It’s just beginning, of course, but I think this will be fairly representative of where I want to go with the look of the game.

Here’s Emaline, standing on a foggy pathway in front of a frighteningly full moon.  The textures are hand drawn, with a post-processing hue/saturation, burn and bloom filter in the game engine.  The fog is a particle effect.  The foreground and back ground are a number of parallaxing layers to give a nice pseudo-3d effect.

Emaline herself is animated from numerous components using a keyframing system.  Although my original idea was to use a kind of tweening system to interpolate positions, rotations and scales of individual components, it just looked too mechanical and wasn’t worth it.  Instead, I’ve been hand animating different parts, like the legs for running or her hair waving in the wind when falling, and it’s looking much nicer.  The component system also gives me the benefit of easily combining different components by swapping out source textures rather than having to animate every possible permutation of visible item combinations.  For example, I can simply change the currently used texture for her head to change her equipped hat.

Although the amount of animation required to make Emaline look good is fairly large, I think it’s necessary given the fact you’ll be looking at her the entire time you play.  You’ll notice here there’s even separate animations for left and right motion, so the blaster pistol is always in her right hand!

Just to tie everything together, here’s the improved set of collision geometries for Emaline.  The blue box is her world collision.  The white triangle is her ground collision.  The difference between blue and white is that the ground collision rectangle has a friction co-efficient associated with it to keep her from sliding on the ground, while the world collision box has no friction, to keep her from being able to stick to walls.  Again, the little yellow box is the ground sensor to help change Emaline’s state.  And finally, the new red oval is the enemy collision sensor.  I decided to use a separate collision sensor for determining damage rather than simply use the world collision box so that I could change its size when she crouches or hovers in the air.  If I changed the size of her world collision box on the fly, it could lead to some possible bugs if it were to  suddenly intersect a platform or wall when it changed with her state.

Eventually I’ll be redoing Emaline’s graphics entirely so they look more polished and better match the textured look of the rest of the world, but for now these simple colored animations are serving me well for purposes of debugging the character animation system, and allowing me to move on to combat.