Here is what I started out with, and what I ended up with so far.

Started out with a ball on a screen. Had no idea what the game should be about.. Didn’t even know it would become a game.

Then made the ball fall under the influence of gravity, and added a small static cannon capable of shooting small red balls.

Added colliders to the balls, so the red balls could hit the red ball and then, to make a bit of a game out of it, I added some spikes, that killed the yellow ball on impact.

Added some graphics, and changed the mail ball to a beach ball.

At this time I did my small crap animation project, so of cause that was added to the project. I also did the super soaker graphics while trying out different vector based drawing programs and that was added as well.

The red balls was replaced by a water ball/splash texture.

Added a basic score, so each time you hit the beach ball with a ball of water you got a point, and game when the beach ball hit the sand.

I got the idea to add something to hit instead of just having to hit the beach ball, which was to easy.

I wanted to have a really fast game over to new game cycle, so all I wanted was a single start button in the middle of the screen. At first I would have liked to be able to share scores on Facebook, but as I haven’t gotten it to work 100% I discarded it for now. Maybe in a later version.

Just changed some of the background graphics, and added best score to the score display.

Added sand to the beach.

Completely new graphics, made by a nice fellow that I’m teaching to program, and in exchange his making me some pleasant graphics

New button and font added, that matches the rest of the theme better. The basic font is called Floraless and is made by Daniel Gauthier.

Small but very visual change, I made the score use the new font, by having a bitmap for each number and one for the slash, and then added code to convert the string into an array of the correct sprites.

The last change was the graphics for the crab that now looks a lot more organic and less flat.

The two thing keeping me from uploading it to the android store is the seagull- and the crap-animation. I will work on the crap animation as soon as everything thats happening in my life right now, settles down a bit.

If you want to try the current (Android only) version of “Beach Fun Seagull Hunt” just click the link below.
Old version April 9th : md5 : aad8aee9879d29ad0e8bf32cc451b097 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk
New version April 12th : md5 : 5f145660cae4dab6d5c4fea869403f36 *Beach-Fun-Seagull-Hunt.apk

Now go make games!

– Henning

hmm, pixel art animation and me, not so good. So what was the alternative. I searched the great big internet, and found an article telling me that Inkscape was the tool to use. I had tried it before and liked the idea of being able to tweak the image without having to repaint it, just move the vector elements. So I found an image on Google that I could use as a reference image, and started painting.

Ok, maybe, just maybe I should have read some more about how, Inkscape was used to animate.. Ok so you make all the frames in Inkscape, export them one by one and then use Gimp (wonderful tool) to make the spritesheet.. Eeerrr, that was kind of what I didn’t want to do. So back to searching the net.

Success, Synfig! Ok, here was a tool that was vector based and could animate like hell Yay! So tried to import my Inkscape crab, as it was in svg format, but no success Not a great start, but ok, I could start over. So a new crab was born.. But hell to do, compared to Inkscape. Everything was drawn with the origin at the center of the screen, not the object, and worse, you can’t move the origin! What the ….? Ok, painting the first eye and made a group, everything is to be in groups in Synfig, and wanted to copy and mirror the group. Copy, ok. Mirror…. mirror… hmmm.. No? You can only mirror individual objects, and as the origin was fubar the first place I had to do this via scaling (x=-1.0) and the try to move the new mirrored legs to the right location, and by using the scale function something was off, and the moment was weird. I’t might have been me, but I didn’t have ANY problems in Inkscape. So the thought of having to do animation and rotating (around the center of the selected points only) and moving objects around, just told me to, not go there.

And the crab looked worse in Synfig, as every change was a pain compared to Inkscape.

So what to do… I was thing of using Unity and the new 2d animation support, but I used it before, with success but it felt off, and not completely thought through. So I hit the new for the third and final time. If I didn’t find anything I would just make 3-5 crappy crab frames in Gimp or PyxelEdit (another GREAT tool). But by luck I found what I was looking for, I hope. It’s called Spriter, and if it’s half as good as it looks I’m going to be a very happy guy. You can download the free version at the BrashMonkey site, and try it out for your self. I have played with the free version and the demo project last night, and it just feels right in every way. So I just spend the 25$ for the full version, and is now going to take the parts from the Inkscape crab, I know I have to export all the pieces into separate files (that might be something they will change in time, I have to investigate), and than use the skeleton system will be so easy to use, to do the animation. It might even have some inverse kinematics

I really believe the Spriter is going to be the solution to a lot of my animation challenges. I will return with my experience with Spriter soon

Now, go make games

– Henning

After only a week and not much time to look into Unity 2D I must say that I don’t think I’ll ever look at another game engine ever again The 2D workflow, sprite importer, animator, ordering layer and so on, just makes everything SO easy. I’m simply blown away.

I have so many options now, that I don’t know what game to start making, which i great Now I just have to finde the time to make it all happen..

If you don’t have allready, go download Unity 4.3….  To get started take at look at 2D Game Development Walkthrough.. Unity 2D RULES!!

Have fun and go make games!

– Henning

I’ve spend some time making the basic stuff for a 2D game using Unity. Forcing Unity to make a 2D game have been a challenge, It works but I’ve spend a lot of time handling sprite sheet, animation and other standard stuff and not on the actual game. Then by pure coincident I saw someone mentioning Stencyl on spiludvikling.dk so I took a look, and if version 3.0 keeps it promises I guess I’ll be doing all my 2D games in Stencyl. Only thing about Stencyl I don’t like is the missing possibility to use C# and the still missing Android support But for now it’s so easy to use, that I’ll gladly learn Scratch and objective C.
Now that Unity version 4.3 is out, I’ll have to try it out to see if it’s as easy as they say, and if it is, I might switch back. If not, I’ll save Unity for my 3D needs

Have fun! Now go make games!

– Henning