Devlog 7: Bringing Sacrifetus to Life!

Welcome back dear friends and enthusiasts for another weekly Sacrifitus devlog!

This week we made significant progress on the visual front, focusing mainly on bringing our character art into the game engine and updating the systems needed to support it. So let's not waste time and dive right in!

Programming Character Sprite Implementation:

This week, we focused on integrating our artist's final sprites into the game. Initially, I underestimated the task, thinking it would be a simple process of extracting frames from texture sheets and creating flipbook animations. While the core concept holds true, the sheer volume of sprites made this surprisingly time-consuming. Each sprite sheet required careful verification for correct frame alignment, followed by selecting the necessary frames for each animation sequence.

Additionally, this work necessitated updating our sprite rotation logic from a single direction to support multiple directions. This part is still in progress and will require more attention next week.

Despite the laborious process, it's incredibly rewarding to finally see the artist's characters moving around in the game world!

Besides integrating our sprites we also made it so sacrificing a baby restores health to the player. That was not a lot of work just finding the right place to implement it and fixing a bug that would overheal the player. We also made a compass HUD element that points to the altar, took some trigonometry to get it pointing in the right direction. 

Character Sprite Conversion:

This week our enemy sprites got updated for a final time. We passed our model with all it's animations (attack, death, walk and our new idle) through our sprite converter for the last time, but this time we added an extra toon shader which adds some more pixelation and dimension on the previous flat surfaces. We also render our enemy from multiple angles to make movement in the game more realistic.

We also finished our sacrifice model and it's idle pose. For the model we did some last tweaks, like adding a binky to add some more shape to the face and repositioning the legs to make it more realistic. After rigging the model, we made a simple idle animation where the baby does some little movements while sitting. And lastly, we rendered the baby from the same four angles as the enemy and with the same toon shader.

The player sprites also couldnt miss out. Both players got their idle animations, walk and attack animations and of course their death animations. Which all got their sprite sheets. The players both have individual idle animations to make them feel a bit  more unique as well. 

While the carrying of the sacrifice or the fellow player sprites hasn't been fully finished yet. The will be there for next weeks worklog and would be ready soon :) Have a little sneakpeek of how it will look like tho ;)

UI:

We then started working on our UI elements. We started with the UI in the game since this one is linked to certain abilities or actions. 

The first thing we made, was the mini-map which is used to find sacrifices and our altar. To make this map functional we needed: a map background, an altar sprite, two sprites for our players and a sprite for the sacrifices. 

Then we worked on the counter. This one needed a background, a max amount and a changeable amount

After this, we worked on the health bar. This health bar breaks down as a player looses health. So for this health bar we needed 3 different health bar frames. On top of this we needed a background, health bar,  our two player icons and a revive bar.