WIP WednesdayWIP WednesdayWIP WednesdayOctober 18, 2023October 18, 2023October 18, 2023
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Hey everyone, it’s time again for another Work-In-Progress Wednesday! I’m here today with another sneak peek at the upcoming Alien Monster Pack 2, plus a little more about what I’ve been working on other than pixel art.
Alien Monster Pack 2: Two New Monsters Revealed!
Put your hands, claws, or tentacles together for the latest new species to be discovered in Alien Monster Pack 2! On the left is Amoeba, who we met last week.
In the middle is Moon Muncher, an alien quadruped known for its voracious appetite. Its spiked carapace can repel most attacks, and although it’s slow and heavy it never fails to catch its prey using its powerful jaws and fangs.
On the right is Skittermite, a vaguely insectoid alien creature that can infest pretty much any space station. It’s adept at moving quickly from side to side, and can even jump! Let’s hope you don’t meet one on your next spacewalk…
Stay tuned for the reveal of the final alien monster next Wednesday, and the asset pack release on the 27th, just ahead of Halloween!
SparkBolt Game Engine Progress
Work on SparkBolt is continuing smoothly. Between all the pixel art, I had some time to get some features back up and running that I had disabled during my transition to an entity-component system model (ECS). It’s nothing special this time, but here’s a few screenshots!
Animation test, using Atmocopter! If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a helicopter robot from my game that’s on hiatus as I build this new engine.
The AnimationController can have multiple animations loaded, and I can switch between them. The animation for the below “nut” graphic has variable-size frames, so this is a testing how the AnimationController can set the vertices of the mesh accordingly when the frame changes.
Tilemaps are also working again. I turned on some random camera movement and waited for it to zoom in for this pic.
Finally, the most exciting test of all! So exciting all you need is the debug window. It’s a simple little asset-loading test, where I can make sure that loading/unloading assets works. Multiple loads of the same asset shouldn’t load the asset again, but instead return the one that’s already loaded. It also has a stress test mode so I can make sure there’s no memory leaks. Fun stuff!
That’s all there is to report so far. I’m glad I’m building all these tests this time around to make sure everything works. I also did some work on serialization (data saving), but it’s not quite done yet. I’ll keep you posted! I’m so excited to finally have the engine moving forward- It’s going to power my pixel art editor and my future games!
Thanks for your support, and see you next week with another WIP post and the Alien Monster 2 pack!
– Will