Short Summaries and Soul Stealing Socks

As lockdown lifts in the UK, and pubs and whatnot reopen, our #EgoProblems are still staying at home. Partly because the evidence from medical experts suggest this isn’t the time to reopen, but mostly because that’s where the #EgoOffice is and there’s work to be done!

My brain is a little melted guys; last week I tried to put the entire working design for the Horde codebase into my head, and it hurt. I feel like this was once the sort of thing I could do, but I guess the years have been cruel, so it now takes a real concerted effort. Or maybe I just know more now, so think about more when planning? I like that excuse better. Let’s go with that.

Anyway, one of the things I’ve been trying to do is work out the storage structure for a zombie. Each zombie skin will have a name, an icon, a spritesheet or model (still need to decide on the art direction there), and probably some reference to what type it is.

Background for non-techies: A spritesheet is a big list of 2D images of your character in various positions. By cycling those images very quickly, you create simple animations. Old school games and some 2D games to this day, use this style of animating characters to great effect. More modern games, usually but not always 3D, instead use a model that is animated using a skeleton. This allows for a much greater variety of poses and motion, as well as greater smoothness of motion that takes less time to achieve.

If it has a reference to what type it is, that may as well be a link to the defined zombie types, which mean they would also have access to the type information, attack power and the like. Plus, I suppose we’ll have different soundbites for each zombie, rather than each type, so that’ll go in there too. And, well, I think that’s it for now. I’ve probably forgotten something, but truth be told, I’ve been using this section to plan it out. Thanks guys!

And honestly, that’s about it for this week. It’s been a slow one, truth told. SockMonkey work is proceeding at a steady rate. On a related note though, in a-hobby-a-week news, we made sock animals this week! I bought them as a valentines gift, and this is the first chance we’ve had to actually make them. Only issue is, they do look a bit like soul consuming horrors from another plane of existence. But hey, it was fun! I’m off to continue to make Horde now, and hopefully not unleash any more eldritch horrors.

Matt out.