001 to 999
Getting the droid graphics into the project was very much a repeat of process used to get the tileset images from my previous two posts.
Taking screen shots until I had enough images to build up all of the droid animations and numbers. Within the game there are a total of 24, not including “001” himself.
I went through a long process of getting all of the unique frames into the animation and making them work just like the original game. This process took a while because it was done by trying to capture a frame at a time using a C64 emulator running the game and snapping out screen grabs.
I did try recording an animation but found the quality of each frame so poor that i would have spent ages redrawing the frames again pretty much completely. The process was done in three stages:
- Get the order of the stills in the correct order.
- Fill over the parts of the animation that I wanted on a separate layer – the second row in the picture above.
- Change the colour back to white and clean up any anti-aliasing along with colour smudges.
This process was then repeated for the number in the droids centre. Thankfully Tony also helped out by getting screen shots of each droid so I could concentrate on mostly just the tidying up.
Finally, each frame of the animation and each number (droid name/number) was exported into separate files. And then from here it’s all moved over to Game Maker for integration into the project…
To be Continued …