Zity - Health Bar and Liquid

It's been a while since my last post, mostly due to the holidays and sickness. I've still been working on Zity in the meantime and actually managed to get quite a fair bit done in a few late nights. One thing that particularly challenged me was in implementing a health bar.

Now I don't want to give too much away but basically I wanted a very dynamic health bar that would be able to show a wealth of information without shoving a large amount of numbers and pictures at the player. I had sketched out a design a while back and finally got around to implementing it in December.

The first problem I encountered was that I wanted the bar to contain liquid (Blood, basically) as a fun, creative way to display the characters state. I've known about the many various particle methods and spring methods of simulating liquid flow but I wanted something simpler and easy to modify. My first instinct was a shader (XNA - Effect), that skewed the water surface to simulate flow. Here is the result:

The liquid is rendered from a simple rectangle using my custom shader.

Getting this result wasn't easy (though it is fairly simple) as I had very little knowledge of shader programming and even less knowledge of wave functions. To make it worse most other tutorials and articles I found were explaining more complicated methods that I did not want nor need. After a lot of research I found a close enough example and from there managed the rest on my own. 

If you would like to know how to render a waterline (I'll be calling it a waterbox from here on) keep reading.

Zity - Tile Art

This week's post isn't going to be about Zity but rather about a free art program I recently discovered and will be using for Zity (unless I hire an artist of course).

Krita

There's a lot you can find out about Krita on their website here, but I'll give you an overview.

Krita is a free digital painting program. You can think of it like photoshop with more of a focus on painting and less focus on photos, and of course it's free. Krita uses a complex brush engine system that is very flexible and allows you to create the kind of brush you need. It also works with layers, color pallets, shape tools, gradients, and pretty much anything else you could want. Krita is also consistently updated with bugfixes and new features so there are no worries of using an outdated, glitchy program. It's basically wonderful and anyone interested in doing digital painting/art should seriously check it out.

Zity - of Problems and Setbacks

This post doesn't have too much to do with anything recent but I thought I'd pass along some information and all the things that a game programmer starting out would want to know before they find out for themselves.

Zity has been in serious development for over a year now, but if I'm honest... I've been working on Zity for something more like two years. It started out as an idea and it went through several iterations before any sort of actual game was fleshed out. During those iterations a lot of trial and error, research, and improvements were made, and while these were all necessary at the time I would not want to repeat them again.

Some things to watch out for:

Often times as a game developer I overlook aspects of the game that I assume would be easy. They never are. In order to avoid the continuous cycle of overlooking something and then having to go back and alter everything I've had to really force myself to dig deep into the systems that make up Zity and make solid decisions on the game.

A List: