You say it works great on touch devices, but on my Samsung Note 12.2 it shows a black box over the middle of the screen and nothing happens when tapping.

I like how you posted ever better versions as the rendering went on

Looking forward to seeing the finished game, good luck!

Hi, all!

I have been working on a way to create either temp or actual usable sprites quickly. What if we could place preset parts onto a grid and quickly, using the keyboard manipulate them. Change their position, size, color, even angle. From this idea StuffGEN was born.

You can see a video of it in action here - I built a system that shows what keys are being pressed and what mouse clicks are taking place so you can already learn the basics as you watch:

Thanks to Burvey and TiAm some new features were added (such as opacity on number keys 1-0) and, certainly I need to thank R0J0hound for being mega-patient with all sorts of technical questions.

From humble beginnings it has grown into something less humble - there are now 112 tiles to pick from, it can actually export a neat, clean transparent background PNG of only the sprite, you can even save and load object files that allow for returning to previous work AND merging of objects. You also get a neat help screen with instructions:

Now it has reached the fourth inner generation and I'd like to open it to a wider audience to get some more feedback, so here it is:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... index.html

Best approach is to Ctrl+Mouse Wheel zoom so it's of usable size - the exported image file will always be 512x512px for now. You can resize those inside the C2 editor or whereever.

Known issues:

Because of the way C2 works with layers currently one can only send a part to either the top or the bottom of the layer.

There's no undo or redo - save often if you want to stay safe.

Upon export some tiles gain unnecessary lines on their sides - guess it's a side effect of C2's image optimization.

At least on my setup tiles that become smaller than a certain size (say, 64 pixels) on one side automatically become greatly reduced in their inner resolution and thus very pixellated.

Selection is a bit unwieldy as it is, but I'm hoping to fix this in a future version.

Future plans:

Undo, perhaps Redo.

Decent selection system, as expected from an editor (for now select with left clicks, deselect with X).

Ability to change the canvas size as necessary.

Tilesets (this has been made forward-compatible in the save system so, hopefully, the files should work in the future).

Here are some ready-made objects to get you started:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... Robot.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... rShip.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... /Tank.json

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... yborg.json

This is the (ugly) ship I build in the demo video:

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/132 ... /Ship.json

Have fun and, please, share your creations, feedback with ideas for different tiles, features, etc. This won't be available forever so if it seems interesting please do give it a try.

NOTE: There is a good chance that the tileset will change so please don't get too attached to your creations if you save them as JSON.

Neat, nice to see a proper project just being done, instead of the usual "How do I make game X" questions and whining how C2 doesn't do this or that.

Thought - depending on performance you could probably use a HSL or replace color shader to add some slight variety to the characters as well by shifting their hues.

Also - I get harmless tourists, but what the heck is that robot thing with a mask on it?

That's pretty cool. I tried to get into blender, but apparently am too old to learn new tricks, so my one true love 3ds max it remains

I guess you could have used Spriter as an option - to have really smooth animations and blend between them, it probably wouldn't be too hard to get used to it (although it does certain things in a weird way).

Кстати, прочитал описание крестьянки в демо-видео магазина

Actually everything seems quite charming and humorous. Are you doing all the aspects by yourself (writing, art, sound)?

Awesome, glad to have helped by proxy. Thanks for the link, sounds like this might help.

Wow, that is quite impressive, must have been a huge amount of work to make all the assets and plan it out. Have to agree that the art is a little busy, but if you have turned the saturation down on the background it should be all right. You could probably also add some variety by making night/day/morning/midday levels (by simply placing a semi-transparent colored layer on top) or adding some rain particles, etc.

Are all the animations pre-made/rendered or are the little people made from parts and animated separately?

It seems like you have a good grasp with the basics, so my feedback would be about some details - I would make the castle as a separate object and place it on top of the layout so the villagers don't just pop up in front of it, but actually appear to walk out of it. Also the interface bits are a little obscured by all the details - perhaps place them on (semi-transparent) panels?

But other than that - well done, I wish you luck with getting it finished and published.

I have to agree with the previous comments about the controls.

Also - it has the difficulty of something like VVVVV - that's alright, BUT - it also quite close up on the action so there are moments where you simply couldn't see the danger (like when you need to float before hitting some spikes). If that's the idea - dying to progress - it's all good, just a matter of taste - there have been games like that. But if not then it just feels like a "I designed this so I know how to get through it, haha!" sort of thing.

Perhaps it would make sense to either play this up (with some simply ridiculous unavoidable deaths (like a massive box falling from the ceiling and smashing through the floor together with you - on the next restart there's a gap there to jump over, for example). Or, perhaps, tone it down a little, like giving you a little bit of (invisivble) regenerating health - so if you just touch a spike it would hurt you and throw you back a bit - if you run straight back you would die, but if you are careful you'll be back to full health. This way if you dive into a spike pit you'll die anyway, but if you just walk into a spike (like at the very start) with the buttons - you'll just see that it hurts.

Another thing - depending on your approach - whether you want to make it fair or just "die to explore" - you could make deadly things more prominent - i.e. color-code or motion-code, so to speak - like make the spikes a different color, or make them pulse in and out (or, for example, make them rotating saws - it's a little cliche, but instantly clear that they are deadly). Thus making the player aware of the danger and not just memorising the levels.

A lot will obviously also depend on presentation. The initial version of Portal (Narbacular drop) looked very different, and, frankly, not too appealing. But see what came from it. A crazy laboratory of death is always a cool location, certainly more appealing than " green lawn run and jump game 9823" so if you play your cards right this could be neat.

Thanks, R0J0hound! If you ever need some artwork (icons, objects) or, perhaps, if you accept donations let me know.

I previously put an AJAX object in, BUT didn't add the "on completed" action so it never returned usable results. Now it works! I can actually save and load my arrays and then process them to create objects, which is very cool:

[attachment=0:20qjag99][/attachment:20qjag99]

I'll write down the necessary steps "for dummies" (like me) if someone searches for something similar in the future:

Saving:

In my case the data is an array so saving is easy - just have a "Download as JSON data" action.

For loading:

Place a FileChooser and AJAX objects in your project. The Filechooser acts like an actual button so place that on the layout. It also has some properties, like are multiple files possible and what filetypes to accept.

In the event sheet:

Add a FileChooser "On Changed" condition of AJAX - Request Url - FileChooser.FileURLAt(0) "LoadFile" <== This is your tag, to know where the file comes from

Add an AJAX "On 'LoadFile' completed" condition with an Array - Load from JSON string - AJAX.LastData

After this add some actions to process your array.

Voila! File saving and loading.

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Extra question, if I may - is there a way to replace the ugly Load button with something else? It's an eyesore and it gets shifted around when zooming in and out in the browser. Ideally there would be a way to shift it off-screen and trigger from another sprite button, but I suspect security measures won't let that happen?

Anyone? This has really stumped me, unfortunately, cannot really find a workable solution by searching.

Thanks newt - that somewhat does what is needed, BUT it has no support for frames, which are rather integral to my approach... Well, I have added some GUI changes that let me add as many parts as needed, so that could help a little.

Why would it run slower? It either has enough memory or not.