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[March]

In honor of the month, and because I'm trying to work on one myself, the theme I've chosen for this round of the Tune Contest is "March."

That's march as in John Phillip Sousa, as in Mendelssohn's bridal processional, as in Darth Vader AND Indiana Jones' theme music, as in "Pomp and Circumstance," as in the theme song to "Mickey Mouse Club," as in "Colonel Bogey" (the whistling theme from Bridge on the River Kwai), as in Mozart's "Turkish Rondo," as in "Entry Of The Gladiators" and pretty much every circus song there ever was. There are a lot different ways to go with this.

To set the bar as low as possible, here's a chunk of what I'm working on. As you can hear, it's still very bare bones, and I could really use the inspiration:

The Up Ship! March

Deadline for submissions is March 26!

I have a room with a mirror, a tiny room, in which I have a hole cut in a walk-behind through which the mirror character appears. I've put together code from a few sources on the forums, condensed, because my walk area is so small I don't really need to do extensive measuring from the bottom of the mirror to make the effect work (you can see a picture of the room in an image at the bottom of this thread).

Here's what I have:

function room_RepExec()
{
cFelixReflection.x=player.x+35;
cFelixReflection.y=player.y-20;

cFelixReflection.Frame = player.Frame;
 int l = player.Loop;
 if (l == 0 || l == 3) l = 3 - l;
 cFelixReflection.Loop = l;
}

I also have some objects in the room, for instance, a set of drawers, that the player walks to before opening, so:

player.Walk(oFelixDrawer1.X,oFelixDrawer1.Y,eBlock,eWalkableAreas)

When I interact with the drawer, the player walks to it as I'd hoped for. Unfortunately, the mirror character does not, and creepily stands there before disappearing once the drawer is opened. Any suggestions on getting mirror man to follow?

[UPDATE: You're going to have to wade through a few posts of crap before you get to anything that looks good, but as of March 7, this is the best I've done:]

UPDATE: You're going to have to wade through a few posts of crap before you get to anything that looks good, but as of March 7, this is the best I've done:



Hi folks. I'm a new member here, and have enjoyed looking through this sub-forum more than any other part of the site. There are some amazingly talented people congregated here.

...Which is why I'm a little embarrassed to share my learning process with you. I'm slowly, slowly attempting to make a small game of my own, and by far, the most daunting part is animation. Tonight, I decided to start learning by trying to animate the key frames of a walk cycle. Results were not that great, but I have made some process.  At midnight, I had never animated a walk cycle before, and now I've made several tries at it:

I hand drew 1/2 of the walk cycle just to sort of get my bearings. Very very loose doodles here, and throughout my other attempts below as well.



Toned down the extreme frame where it looks like the character looks like he's about to break into a run, did a doodle-over second draft, and tossed on some color in Photoshop:



With this version, I was also trying to deal with the physics of the body. This character has a bit of a paunch that I wanted to see bounce a little when he took steps. This is me trying to get my head 'round the effects of gravity and inertia that happen as we take steps. Here's a version with a faster framerate:



The arm swing and gait are still a bit extreme here. After this draft, I thought it might be helpful to break things down to an abstract level, and did a sticks n' shapes version, making the swing and gait not so exaggerated:



Still lots of issues, but I think it doesn't look too bad if you cover up the stick feet (wish I'd done the joint on the ball of the foot). I also think that the figure should lean forward slightly.

I've found a number of the tutorials linked in the sticky'd post useful, and I especially wish the Biomotion lab app allowed you to advance through their motion capture walk cycles frame by frame. I'm still looking around at some other resources, and hopefully will find some time to improve later this week. I feel like being able to do something like this is a hurdle I have to clear before thinking seriously about making a game of any length.

Anyway, thanks for checking in on my learning process so far. Hope you aren't too horrified!