Character Editor Update – Creating Sprites

For the past several weeks I have been working on a little tool that will (I hope) greatly facilitate the content design and creation stages of development.  I started with a Vector Sprite Creator found on Ziggyware.com and extracted out the relevant pieces into, what I am calling, the Entropy Editor.  It is still in the very early stages of development, but so far it looks to be quite promising.  The goal was really to provide a way to easily create and edit entities for the game.  From characters and weapons to ladders, trees, and boxes (“Oh my!”), the editor should allow us to create sets of entites that can be easily imported into a level.  

Currently however, only the primary pieces are in place.  When creating an entity, you first define the sprite associated with that entity.  This involves creating the sprite sheet, defining vector bounds around the image (used for collision – more on that another time), and defining animations.  In the future, we will likely specify any effects that can be performed on an entity (blurring, refraction, etc), but that is in the future.  

The UI will almost certainly be adjusted and polished over time, but this is what I am working with for now.  The work flow for creating vector bounds and animations will also be refined to be slightly more intuitive.  Later this week I will touch on the entities themselves and how they leverage the sprites created with the methods mentioned above.  Thanks for reading!

~ by gwoodj on August 13, 2008.