CrossCode Update #45
It’s GIF time!

Alright, last update before the CrossWeek!

We finished our editor for animations and have some more or less interesting animations for you. We also started implementing the new tutorial boss enemy and added some nice new ball effects. Lastly we baked the game again, which is kinda like creating a release version.

Animation Editor

Felix finished the animation editor and even gave it some polish (we can’t resist, sorry :P). So, let’s summarize some features the editor has:

  • creation/deletion of multiple sub-entities
  • creation of several animations
  • creation of sub-animations per sub-entity
  • creation of sprites per sub-animation
  • inspect and play/stop animation via timeline
  • Drag-And-Drop entities and sprites for positioning

With this editor we simplify the process of creating complex animations, so we don’t spend huge amounts of time fiddling around in JSON files for every big boss………!

bigBossTeaser

…yeah…

Let’s move on!

Felix used a rather funny placeholder enemy you might already have spotted on his Twitter account. Since an animation editor is nothing without an actual animation he created some… interesting animations. Here is a simple one:
anim-editor-3 We scaled the GIF down a bit to reduce the file size. It is also a bit faster than it actually is.

He then moved on to create something more mature:

anim-editor-4

Well… it WAS complex to animate, and it worked! Future animations will be at least as awesome as this one, promised!

Tutorial Boss

For the training session with captain Jet we mentioned in CrossUpdate #43, we added a special type of turret enemy, that will teach you how to aim better and use bouncing balls to your advantage. For this purpose we also created new types of balls. Check out this GIF for a “homing ball”-type shot by the large turret:

large-turret-bullethell

Of course these are just placeholder graphics but we hope they give you a good look at some interesting battle situations.

Baking

Some of you might wonder what we mean when saying “we baked the game again”. Well, baking is the process of merging all the game files together into a single compressed one. This is a feature available in impact.js by default. But we extended the process to also include a more advanced type of obfuscation via Google closure compiler, which has the tendency to break things…

like… breaking bad …

heisenboss

Okay we’ll stop now, promise.

Closure Compiler has some advantages, such as a type analysis that actually helped us spot some errors today. In the end we fixed a lot of bugs and got a version of the game that runs as smooth as the developer version. From now on we probably will bake the game more often to ensure everything works fine and we don’t end up with millions of problems when we actually want to release the game.

Aaaaaand that’s it for this week. Over the course of the next week we will be at CrossWeek, where some of our team members meet to work on CrossCode all day, no distractions. We hope we can produce some nice new content for you this way and also push the game towards the demo.

So stay tuned and until next time!

2 Comments

  • I really enjoyed this update and man the main charakters animations look great. The running beeing animated for all 8 directions makes it nice and fluid.

    Now I realize what is still missing from the Hyper Light Drifter animations.^^

    So many great games in the indie scene right now. Keep it up. :-D

  • I was gonna comment the same thing: your animations are insanely well done

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