Coding coding coding...

Over the past few days I have been sorting out the bugs in both the code of my game engine and the character art/animation. Art wise I have changed the head on Franklin in his up and down positions so that his face and eyes are in line with the perspective he is facing. This was one of the things highlighted to me by one of the guys in our gaming group in class. He wondered why it looked like Franklin was looking at the player when in these positions which was a good call. Another thing I have changed with the art is the white anger ghosts which I will put the new art into the game tomorrow. Basically the problem with the old is that it wasn't working with how the hit box works in game. To help me explain this I have drawn this quick little diagram:

Basically if you hit the ghost in the area highlighted you would die, yet clearly the space hatched in should allow you to live because that is empty space beneath the ghost and just before the tail. With some intense coding well beyond my capability I could probably fix it so that the hit box was defined around the outline of the ghost character but since this is by no means an option I have simply revised the artwork of the ghost and brought his tail up to go behind him so that he fits better within the hit box.

Game engine wise I have been sorting out the problems to what has shown itself to be a problem after putting the game to rigorous use, mixing different game mechanics together and hitting things in different modes and at different places within each level etc. I have also gone about setting up the new game mechanic with the inner monster. At the moment the trigger points are being represented as Dark Franklin's but these will just be circles later that are transparent so that you have no idea when they are coming. Passing over these trigger points then brings up a green box with an angry face on it, a placeholder for some inner monster character art. Then hitting into this green box then causes Franklin to change states and play out an animation, this will be Franklin being tormented by the inner monster but at the moment its just him in a pink box moving up and down. And to finish, the game controls are swapped as planned so up is down, down is up etc. Obviously I can't have this play out for the remainder of the level as I wish to have about 4 or so of these trigger points in each level so I have it controlled by a timer like I do the ghost mode and pacman mode (now dubbed vulnerability mode for copyright reasons!).