Stencyl Collisions skill development.

Next technical skill to develop is collisions. I had problems with this last year and found my character sprites would glitch when colliding with each other.

This is another tutorial made by the same one who did the tile sets:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkywrBBDPn8

Technically you use your tile sets and adjust the collision lines around the edge of for example a barrel. The points you move around is similar to masking with the pen tool in After Effects which has moveable points around. It's also like the Pen tool in Photoshop and even Illustrator has this feature too.
The actor or player character will then collide with the scene object, but they can move through them if it's a non collision tile. Putting these objects on another layer and moving it above the existing layer allows the character to move behind the object. This can be very useful for having a hidden path or treasure behind an object, then allow the player to get behind it too without collisions.
I will be using this skill for my own games, as it's good for level design and gives the players more incentive to look in every possible places for hidden goodies.

Stencyl tileset tutorials

Last week I got a grasp of building my own tile sets in Stencyl. The method I used was to paint them first in Photoshop then import them in Stencyl. An easier method would be to simply create the tiles in Pencly but the plug-in had some issues. It does work on my laptop but once brought back into Stencyl, the options window wouldn't close meaning they didn't export properly.
For more paint options, I'll be sticking to making the tiles in Photoshop which actually made some already:

The tutorial I used for making tile sets is here on YouTube:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGOPh-Ko6mU
This tutorial had it's funny moments, but he was very informative and easy to understand.
This guy also has a has a collision tutorial so I'll be watching that for my next technical skill development.

I will be applying this skill for my own Stencyl games. The reason is for convenience and saves time which I learned last year the hard way. I created all my environments in Pencyl and exported them in as flat background images. This meant no collisions from environment elements like trees and houses, which is very bad for level design.

Technical skills brainstorm

For the rest of this term, I'll be focusing on building up my technical skills in Stencyl. Currently I'm working on tilesets but there is also a few more aspects I need to work on:

*Tilesets
 *Collisions
*Actor behavior
*Scene behavior
*Attributes
*Logic
*Building scenes like for scrolling levels, including parallax
*Controls with character actions and interactivity
*Building an inventory system

There are a few other different things like sounds, loading screen but these are straight forward to set up in Stencyl, so I'm better off using my time wisely for the skills that need the most time and effort.

Next term I ca go a step further and go onwards to Unity, which I've picked up the basics for last year.
I only know how to build a scene and have a first person controller running around a really basic scene. I really want to go into the coding side to it, which gets a lot more technical than Stencyl.
Blender also has an inbuilt game engine so I could even check that out too.

Stencyl testing

Okay currently I'm furthering my skills with Stencyl. This has been an interesting experience with tilesets that have some issues occurring in the editor. I'm hoping it's just my computer having a minor issue which restarting it might fix. I really need to get a grasp on using tilesets in Stencyl for easier level building. I can get around this problem by creating the tilesets in another program like photoshop then importing them to Stencyl. Honesty this will be a better option as Pencyl is very limited compared to photoshop in designing graphics. For my game in another subject, I'll do this method for better quality. I'll also continue reading the Stencyl text book to further my knowledge and skills especially with behaviors.

Stencyl tutorials.

I checked out some tutorials on Youtube for Stencyl at last weeks workshop session. I mainly looked out into coding and tile sets. I have no ida why I didn't use tile sets for Milk Run last year, it would have made things quicker and more efficient. So for now on I'll be using this instead of making my own environments in Pencyl, which is probably better used as an alternative for making spites instead of Photoshop. I've also got my Stencyl textbook for more extensive information and activities to help in Mastering Stencyl.

Dream Job

My "dream job" has changed gradually over the years. At first I was focused on animation mainly 2D and possibly 3D. To increase my chances of getting into the industry, I completed the Bachelor of Arts Animation and Visual Effects degree at CSU. In regards animation skills, I might do some tutorials on Blender and can animate characters a step further in Stencyl.
Following this is Digital Media which I'm currently studying and my goal did change from this. At first I came here wanting more skills in Web Development, which I didn't enjoy but this changed when I actually focused on the coding side to it. I have been building a website portfolio where I had a struggle on the design elements yet enjoyed building the CSS and HTML codes.
Game design is also one of Digital Media's subjects and my goal began to shift in this direction. Playing games is one of my hobbies and I find it even more fun to actually make my own games. If I was to go in this direction, I would lean more in the direction of coding games instead of the design elements but I can do both.
I won't do a copy paste with this on the conceptual blog, but will find inspirational images instead.

Software I'll focus on will include:

Stencyl
Unity
Dreamweaver

Intro

This blog is connected to the conceptual blog, so there will be similar subject matter between both. The subject matter is in regards to what my future goal will be and the skills required. This will consist of tutorials and resource material required to improve skills focused me chosen career which I will go into more detail about next post.