Year's 2 and 3 Games Art and Design Blog: Stencyl Update

This Week:

It’s been a while since my last post largely as I have thrown myself into the creation of my level and Assets. From the mock screenshot I built last post, I expanded out, creating a level plan in the process:

I’ve also spent the week learning new things on Stencyl such as setting behaviours for the ‘actors’ (assets) in my level. Using useful behaviours obtained through ‘Stencylforge’, a large community area where people upload custom behaviours for things like walking, jumping, health, horizontal platform movement, etc, I’ve also managed to get Mira to walk left and right, in addition to jumping. These might seem like simple things but I’ve found it very difficult as it has required me to change my way of thinking to that of the computer. For example, a unique gameplay element of Page Turners (the name I’ve given my game) is the whole concept of freely switching characters. No behaviour for this exists so I had to construct this from scratch using simple statements;

(The general behaviour)

ALWAYS

If The Down Arrow Key was pressed:

- Create Mira Indian Form/ Mira Base Form at X of Self and Y of Self

- Kill Self

The behaviour then at the press of the down arrow key, instantly kills Mira and creates the Indian form – translating to an instant change on screen.

However certain other actions have been harder to grasp and still elude me. These include: Crouching and using her bow and arrow. For the crouching, I thought I had solved the issue when I found a behaviour for platforming movements that included crouch and wall jumping (which did work!). Unfortunately the crouch did not work through and with the bow and arrow, once she switches the animation she does not switch back which is a huge problem.

As a general update though, in addition to all of the above, at the end of this week I decided to not to go with the level plan but used the assets made (in addition to others) to create a different looking level: