Animation Sample

I got the first batch of animations from David Neale. The animation is not as smooth as I'd hoped (but what did I expect from so few frames?), so I'm talking to him now about adding a few extra frames to smooth it out a bit.

Here's an example of the Idle, Spell Casting, and Taking Damage animations in motion. I love the style!

 

The next big test will be to get this actually working in the game. I'm hoping to have that done in a couple of weeks. (No game logic, of course, just the background and animations in game.)

New Version of the Background

Our artist, the excellent David Neale, has just sent me the latest version of the level he's creating. I like the coloring much better, and the columns have much more detail. Also, notice the wizards are in a slightly different stance. Very niiice.

Battle Screen Mockup (Final? Probably not.)

Daniel and I updated the Battle Screen mockup with a few new things tonight:

• Player 1 now only has 4 spells instead of 8.
• Player 1 is under the influence of one of Player 2's spells.
• Player 2 is under the influence of two of Player 1's spells, plus one of his own.
• Player 1 just had 5 damage done to him. (Note the -5.)
• Player 2 just had 2 damage done to him, then 8 damage done to him. (Note the -2 fading out.)

So does this seem workable to you guys? I was a bit worried at first that players would want to know what exactly those spells they're under the influence of are doing to them, but since there are so few spells being flung around, we've decided it's really not that big a deal.

You'll know what your spells  do to you already, or if you need to know, just select it. So you really only don't know what the other person is doing to you, but you will see him cast the spell, so you can read what it does then.

And if it becomes a problem later on, and people really want to know the details of the spells affecting them, we can use the shoulder buttons to scroll through the list of spells influencing the player.

XACT: Cross Platform Audio Creation Tool (from Hell)

After explaining to Robert how difficult it was getting XACT to work, he told me I should put the story up on the blog, so here it is.

Keep in mind that I had not watched the tutorial video on XACT which can be found here:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/xna/bb245766.aspx

That would've helped out a bit. (Information that would've been useful to me yesterday, as Adam Sandler would say.)

My goal was to simply get the main menu music to play. 

1. I got my mp3 (Crisis.mp3).
2. I used Audacity to convert it from .mp3 to .wav.
3. I started XACT.
4. There are Wave Banks and Sound Banks. I added Crisis.wav to the Wave Bank.
5. I went into the Sound Bank and clicked "New Sound."  A "Sound" is a container for events. An event is something like "Play Wave."
6. I renamed my New Sound "Crisis."
7. I dragged Crisis.wav from the Wave Bank into the "Crisis" Sound I just created, and it created a "Play Wave" event for me. Robert and I assume it's done like this so you could play multiple sounds at once, like "thunder.wav" and "rain.wav" could become a "Thunderstorm" sound.
8. I changed some settings on "Crisis" so that it would fade out at the end.
9. I created a New Cue and named it "MainMenuMusic."  A Cue is basically a playlist, or a container for Sounds.
10. I dragged the "Crisis" Sound into my "MainMenuMusic" Cue.
11. I saved my XACT project.
    
    This is the true end of the XACT steps, but I had to try to play the sound...
    
12. I tried to play the Cue directly from XACT, but I got an error because I didn't have the XACT Auditioning Utility running.
13. I started the XACT Auditioning Utility.
14. Tried playing again. Nothing. Not an even an error this time.
15. Closed the XACT Auditioning Utility.
16. Closed XACT.
17. Started the XACT Auditioning Utility.
18. Started XACT.
19. Opened my XACT project.
20. Played the cue, and damn if the music didn't start playing! Yes!
    
    Back to the C# Game Project
    
21. I modified my code to be soundBank.PlayCue("MainMenuMusic").
22. I built my C# game project.
23. I ran the game and lo and behold, I see my new main menu and "Crisis" is playing in the background. That was cool.
24. I actually go to sleep and don't think about the game for the rest of the night.

Now, if I had been smart, I would've watched the tutorial video first.  If I'd done that, I could've skipped some steps, as apparently you can just drag the wave straight from the Wave Bank to the Cue section and it creates a Cue and a Sound (with a Play Wave event) for you automatically. Dang.

First In Game Screenshot

Technically, it's still a mockup, but unlike the previous mockups (which were made in Photoshop), this is actually running, and the menu does actually work.

Edit: There's also background music. I had to figure out XACT to get it to work, but it's there now.