Thursday, July 25, 2013

Weapon and Animation

The animations in BattleRPG can either be still images, looping animations, or animations that only play once. This applies to players, weapons and enemies.
Here are the default sword and arrow items. Below them is an example of an animated sword. In the game the sprite rotates to simulate the motion of swinging a sword, so make sure to draw any animated sword effects as if the canvas itself is rotating.




Adding enemies

Unlike a player's melee attack, melee monsters do not have a sword object. Their attack needs to be drawn into the sprite. I decided to do this since I always considered a player's sword to be a major part of the game. It defines the player just as much as their character sprite. Enemies should be more generic.
I kept the sword swiping code in the enemy AI if I ever wanted add a sword object in the future. Maybe enemies might drop the weapon they were using, so seeing them use the sword would be incentive to take it from them.









Friday, July 5, 2013

Hosting images

You can customize the look of your character and weapons however you like in BattleRPG. But you will need to host the images online and enter their URLs into the game's character editor in order to use them. Hosting images is a lot easier these days than it was in the past. There are so many sites that let you upload images. In fact I'll just use this blog to host my images. Here are the default graphics for the Knight character skin. The game is actually reading the URLs of these images directly.





Art created by:
Johannes Sjölund