Exploring the world of mobile game development

This weekend, I separated out my character sprites into individual body parts. It didn’t prove to be too difficult for the artwork, but programatically speaking it was a bitch to do. Well worth it in the end tho; the sprite structure can be inherited by any character, and equipped items will now change the character’s physical appearance. Not to mention, it’s very memory-efficient!

Each sprite is split into the following sub-sprites: Head, Body, Legs, LeftShoe, RightShoe, LeftArm, RightArm, Weapon, Accessory. Here’s a sprite set that shows what I’m talking about

DESIGN:
I do everything in Illustrator now (no need to export to Photoshop). Even image slicing is easy!

…decapitated characters are a good thing!

CODE:

Each sub-sprite is added to a sprite display group (i.e. player.sprGrp), given it’s own reference name in the sprite object (i.e. player.sprite.body), and positioned independently based on the current state of the character (i.e. jumping, walking, etc). The downside: for each state, I have to manually position each body part. The upside: I only gotta do it once for each state.

This has nothing to do with my personal hygiene (although I have grown a programmer’s beard recently). I’m talkin about staying code clean!

This past week has be A LOT of code refactoring. Essentially, I’ve organized everything that used to be a hard-coded mess into an object-oriented/class structure; it’s all abstracted and encapsulated for easy use! That means, for example, adding a new character or object to the scene only requires me to make a function call in the main program (instead of copy/pasting repetitive code). Adding a character “player” to the scene works the same way, but calls the player class (which also inherits from the character class).

CODE:
Anyways, here’s what the body of my Scene1.lua file looks like:

It’s pretty structurally sound I think. I just attempted to draw out a flow chart for all the classes, but failed miserably. So instead, here’s what my project file system looks like now. This also needed a ton of organizing, especially since Corona doesn’t allow multi-directory dependencies.