Asset Creation

Now that I have animation working, here (as promised) is the asset creation post. 

Firstly, THIS IS IMPORTANT:

For technical reason we’re going to work using these numbers as much as possible:

0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024... Etc.

From now on I shall refer to these numbers as “bn”, so when I ask for “bn-1” I mean “one less than a number in the above sequence (of your choice)”.

When there’s more than one “bn” value I’ll number them, so “width = bn: height = bn” would mean “I want a square”, whereas “width: = bn1: height = bn2” would mean “I want either a rectangle or a square”.

When I say “n” I mean literally any decimal integer.

Hopefully this isn't too tedious to remember because I guarantee that it will seriously cut down our collective workload in the long run, but for the love of God if this starts to suck the fun out of the project for anyone let me know and I’ll just make a bunch of templates or something.

File Format:

For now the game only reads bmp files. (Although, I might write a png reader later in the unlikely event that it becomes necessary.)

Image file dimensions must always conform to bn1 x bn2 pixels (although the images themselves can be any size you like). More on that later, (see sprites).

Transparency:

For anything you want to appear transparent, change that pixel colour to rbg(255, 0, 255). 

Actually technically any colour can represent transparency so if you want to vote on another colour I'll change it. I picked this colour because I doubted we'd ever need it for the artwork, also it's easy to remember, but I understand that it's kind of headache-inducing so I appreciate that there might be protests. All I ask is that you pick a colour that's rgb(bn1-1, bn2-1, bn3-1) and that once decided this stays consistent throughout the entire game.

Sprites

SOME OF THIS MIGHT CHANGE! Be emotionally prepared for that. What is absolutely definite though, is that we will use sprite animation a lot, and it's quite possible that every graphic in the game will end up becoming a sprite.

This bit is only 90% definite: When making sprite files the area in which the graphic is drawn needs to be bn1 x bn2 pixels. This dimension needs to remain consistent for every graphic in that file. The file also has to be bn1 x bn2 pixels. (Even when this means an annoying amount of white space.) I will re-evaluate this decision after further testing and research.

Whenever there's animation, that animation needs to align vertically* and all sprites in that animation need to have the same width and height - such as this example.

*Would people prefer horizontal? Let's vote.

Right now animations can loop, oscillate or play through a set number of times. I'm tempted to add some more advanced animation controls (ie memory efficient blinking) but want to get the game to a playable state first.

Naming conventions

Use camel case, always starting with a lower case letter.

Environments start "environment", protagonist animations starts "protagonist", non-moving items start "staticItem", animated items start "animItem" any npc animations start "npc" ... there's a lot of undecided stuff so I guess just call anything else whatever and I'll sort it out sometime.

Audio

I don't know what format we'll use yet (probably wav but see how it goes) however this is something that we all need to think about as we go along. Voice actors and music aside, we'll need sound effects, and unless anyone knows any sound technicians we're probably going to have to take responsibility for this. We should make lists of sound effects we're going to use and post them up here, then collectively gather resources, book out the uni's sound recording studio and make a day of it. We can also rent a sound recorder from OASIS for any awkward stuff we can't take into the sound studio (like water, traffic and nature). Additionally the library has copies of the BBC sound effects libraries which we can chop up and use (legally). Athena building has Pro Tools 8 (decent sound editing software).

I think that's everything for now.