Character Creation

Meet Quentin, a goofy-cute dog-boy with a sweet tooth and a sit-down drill!



Quentin is the first (hopefully of many) characters that will be controlled whilst playing Sugar Mine. The above image is a sprite sheet, only the drill bit is animated at the moment. I want to get all the basic visual elements up to a standard before I go wild with extra details.

Time permitting I would have Quentin lean from side to side when the player turns, have his tongue flap about and show little animations of joy or despair when he collects a pickup or the game ends.

Before then though, Quentin is in the game and working out just fine. His little drill turns and he functions just like the arrow in previous videos. He's still a little small but the original sprites are 128x128 each so he can be scaled up at any point if he needs to be more visible.

Thoughts on this: Creating this in Illustrator, each element is kept separate. Which is incredibly fortuitous because if I had created this in Photoshop I would have to separate each element myself (which I know I would fail to do at some point) creating more work.

I bring this up because the creation of new characters and the creation of new drills can be simplified with this in mind. If I wanted to swap Quentin out and replace him with somebody new, I do not need to recreate the drill and the drill animation. I can simply redraw the character.

Better still, I may be able to combine the two in the game engine itself, allowing for even more customization and potential game play choices. I can have the player control two separate entities (character and drill) and with clever placement of centers of rotation and depth I can make it look like one character. This will not only allow a player to combine characters and drills for different visuals but I can also animate both the character and drill independently of each other.

This will be fun and interesting when I get to it.

Before then however I will be creating pickups (coins) and a prize-gumball machine to put the coins in and try to win a reward. I feel that this will provide another layer of reward for the player and encourage a greed-safety choice in the player, whether to avoid obstacles or grab more coins!

For those of you who may not know what I'm talking about, these are gumball machines. Larger version exist that hold small capsules that contain toys, sweets, temporary tattoos and the like. Thanks to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gumball_machines_Dallas_2008.jpg for the image.