DAY 2
Unexpected events kept me from doing a whole lot today, but I did manage to mostly meet my goals.
I have mostly integrated the first enemy mob into the game! It has been dubbed the Squi-Squi. It’s an alien squirrel-raccoon thing that bounces up and down, hurting the player if they touch it. They aren’t particularly hostile creatures, and usually wont chase the player, but will become agressive if you get too close to its nuts 
I’ve devised an interesting system for handling animation for this project. Rather than trying to deal with armatures and rigging (even simple armaturs/rigging gives me a headache), I’m using seperate meshes for each ‘frame’ of the creature’s animation set, and a series of Replace Mesh actuators tied to each frame, with the python code determining which frame-mesh to use at any given time. It gives it a cartoony 2D sprite sort of look, and is a really quick pipeline if your meshes are simple. This little guy is done modeling/animation-wise, and took me a little under 2 hours of work. The next critter will probably take one hour now that I know what I’m doing.
The body is a 8x8 uv sphere with some extruding to get the feet and ears. The tail is a cylinder, subdivided and scaled to shape, then applied to a bezier curve to get the different poses. The face is a subdivided plane placed just in front of the body mesh, with a alpha/emission mapped texture for each facial expression. The materials for the body are set to Object Color so he will flash red when hit (denoting in classic sidescroller cant that he is impervious to damage at the moment).
I am currently having issues with him ‘bouncing’ off the game’s track and ending up in the foreground/background. I have a line in his main loop which does a:
if own.worldPosition.x != 0: own.worldPosition.x = 0
which seems to work fine on the player object, but is not immediately working for the squi-squi. I’m sure it wont take much to resolve, but I don’t have any more time tonight to fiddle with it.
I also implemented basic gun mechanics. Your standard energy-bolt blaster sort of thing. You cannot fire while grappling, and while it has a set rate of fire if you press down the fire button, it will fire semi-auto if you tap the fire button. It damages mobs it touches, and ends itself when it touches anything else.
Tomorrow I will post another gameplay video, or maybe a demo blend (if that’s allowed?) once I get the final pieces of the puzzle put in place for combat.
