It's been a while since I've made any posts on here. Progression on Ito, to compensate, also hasn't much progress. Life's been busy on my part, and I've had little time to get to making the game, really. ...That being said, distractions/lack of discipline don't help, either.
    But enough talk about how slowly Ito's been coming along. There still has been some progress, here and there. Namely, I'm here to talk about a new thing that's been coming along. In this case? A boss! Progress has to be made somewhere. The guy's name is Flake, in case you remember. To go into detail of the planned ideas I have for him, he's got an ice-based arsenal behind him, tossing icicles and rolling into Ito, Sonic-style.
    Programming this is going to be interesting. I suspect I'm going to have to look into "lists", which would be one way to create a kind of order for attack patterns. I could make the code work in such a way that it could pull an attack from the list, and then excecute the behavior of the related text from that list. Once that attack is done, then the behavior could deactivate itself (since behaviors in that engine can de/activate on command) while updating the list's variable.
    It's probably confusing to follow, but it's what I'm hoping to go with. It'd make the other two bosses (which I definitely won't get to by the due date) much easier to program. ...Since I'm clueless on how to end this, here's some placeholder sprites of our main man. Enjoy your day!

​    As I was going about programming the levels for Ito, I came across an interesting problem: I can't fit the whole level in a single room! ("Rooms", for those who aren't familiar with Stencyl (or any alike programs), are places that the game is currently taking place, usually in the form of a level, though they also make up other aspects such as the main menu, or can even relate to cutscenes!) Trying to fill up a room can take up a LOT of space, and unfortunately, Stencyl can only zoom out so far, which makes trying to view everything in the same place extremely difficult and hard to follow.

​    Any and every single game, good or bad, "magnum opus" or "obvious beta", will always, ALWAYS, have one thing in common. What is it? They will always have a level of some sort in them. (And control. There's always going to be some kind of control over the flow of the game, be it direct or indirect.) Why point out something as painstakingly obvious as this? Because it's about, as the title of this should suggest, progress on the first level of Ito has FINALLY started. (It's been 6 months, if not even more, when I started this game. Mull over that for a second.)
    As all good games should go, we start out the game within an icy cave. (Don't worry, there's nothing frictionless in here. Definately not by April, anyway.) From what I understand, a good, basic way to design a game level is to start out with the very basic of colors, and design the level with simple graphics. After all, graphics aren't a big key factor in games, most of the time. Just work with tiles that will have similar colors to what will be going into the final game, so that the feel will still be the same by the time you get to it.

We're halfway through the school year, and as such it's a good time to make a report on how our little stingray is doing.

First things first, I've drawn my first tileset for the game. Tilesets are a type of engine mechanic where you can put down repeating blocks that serve as the level's layout. These are different from "actors", who "act" accordingly and do various things from simply moving around to being an entire player. (Fun fact: the "hero" of a game isn't made in some super special place specifically for them, they're done just like every other actor; they just have more controls associated with them. But that's beside the point.) It's an ice level, pretty much, with a small level of tiles. Not enough to look pretty, but it's enough to tell what I wanna make.

Overall, there's not that much progress I can really talk about. Hopefully, I can get further with this game, with enough progress to start talking about things more. Oh well.

    Who said that Ito had to be the only magic character in the game? After all, there's a whole (small) lore behind this game and its magic powers... it'd be a shame to waste them on just one character! Lo and behold, there are bosses (or their concepts) for this game! But first, let's talk about where our little friends will show up.
​    The game will feature three different environments, all as their own level. You'll have an ice cave, a volcano, and a mystic cave, in that particular order. (Ito the Magic Spelunker?) In each area, there will be creatures of various kinds, and each level their own kind of life. At the end of each level, however, resides a boss. Like Ito, they too wield devastating magic. Unlike Ito, their powers are kinda more stereotypical. (They're not as clever.)
     One of our friends is an armadillo with ice-based powers! Covered with icicles on his back, he'll freeze Ito on the spot if our little hero isn't careful! But that's not the worst of it! There's also a dolphin with the power of fire! Resistant to lava, Ito will have to stay on the tips of his toes if he wants to have even a chance at overcoming this pyromaniac porpoise! 

​    I've been working... somewhat hard on Ito, but regrettably not enough. (Ain't that a formal word?) Progress is sparse, partially because I don't bring myself to do it. At this point, I've decided to take a SIGNIFICANTLY more serious approach toward this. Work on it. Every day. Don't say that "I can't" because my mind says that I'm in a bad mood, or because "I've waited too long, the project will have to wait." I will work on this. In fact, this is probably the only real winning strategy one can take for getting to do what you want to do.
    This is an ugly fact, but reality nevertheless. You don't get better by doing nothing. You get better by DOING that something. This may seem obvious enough, but the thing is... we constantly tell ourselves that we can "do it later". We give ourselves so many reasons why we can't do it right now, and that it'll have to wait. And quite frankly, most of the time these excuses aren't even half-genuine. They're just blatant lies we tell ourselves so that we don't have to do it today. Or tomorrow. Or this week. Or the next. We constantly drag the timer out on when we do this, and by the time we get to doing it again, we're rusty.
    It doesn't have to be a full-on chunk of progress. We don't need to do a full-fledged project every single day. It could simply be a function check, or a new value. It just needs to be SOMETHING. If you look into an artist's sketchpad (one who's serious about doing artwork), you won't find a mangum opus on every single page. You'll find little doodles that contain concepts FAR beyond the stuff you usually find in their main gallery. But if they date their doodles, then you'll find that they'll have something at least once every day. 
    Ultimately, this probably didn't talk too much about our little hero. But this is something that has to have been said. If you're serious about something, do it every day. It's the only way you'll ever be able to go far. (There are cruel facts to take with it, but in terms of this blog's subject, it's one of the important things to accept.)

    So far, you've all known Ito as a kind of moon walker of sorts. Perhaps even a moon stander! Like he's been resonating with his inner Michael Jackson, and striving to go even further than him! Whatever the reason, he's always been facing forward, to the right, and never to the left.
    But alas, all ages must come to an end, and progress must be made, even if they are cosmetic. Because at this point, Ito finally has the ability to ACTUALLY TURN AROUND. Yes, you read that right! Ito can finally face the other direction and... that's kinda it. Yet turning around the protagonist, as odd as it is to say, catches me of guard every time I do it. I SWEAR TURNING AROUND MEANS MORE THAN IT SOUNDS, JUST GO ON FOR SEVERAL MONTHS NOT KNOWING HOW TO FLIP A SPRITE FOR THE ENTIRE SHEET, JUST TO FIND OUT THE WHOLE THING CAN BE DONE THROUGH TWEENING THE ENTIRE ACTOR.

    His bubbles still spawn to the right though, regardless on the direction Ito's facing. Maybe the age still lives on for another day. It will come to its end soon enough.
    Also, I have finally decided on a setting where the game takes place. All I can say is "magic cave." Hopefully I'll actually have my own assets for that one. Until next time! (And hopefully sooner than a month.)

​    After so long of being reluctant, after so long of not even wanting to bother trying to attack, Ito's finally doing it! His attack behavior is finally working! You don't know how happy this makes me, to finally see something that's been holding me back for so long finally overcome.  Amongst finally understanding why I wasn't able to get the animation to work, I even have a little debug walking animation.

     That being said, it is still kind of sad that even after 3 months, the most I've got is this much. At least an animation for the poor guy! At least another enemy! Why isn't there anything else?
    Well for one, I'm horribly lazy. Second, I'm horribly afraid to change what I have for something better. But at this rate, I won't be able to get this project done in time. I need to get more of this stuff done. I'm gonna start motivating myself more often to progress with this game, if not bit by bit! Until next time! (I promise, the next post won't have as bad grammar. I just kinda had to rush this one.)

    For one, I apologize for how forced this blog post is going to feel. There should have been at least a little bit of progress since the last blog, I should have at least gotten SOMEWHERE with the animation problem I had with Ito, right? Eh, well... Kind of. There's progress, but JUST barely.
    To the few of you out there who use Stencyl, you may have heard about that fun little behavior that one can find within one of the kits. (The "Run and Jump" kit, to be precise.) It's called the "Animation Manager", which is a good behavior to use if you need to use animation hierarchies to keep one animation from suddenly playing over another (i.e. walking animation playing when the character is actually supposed to be crouching). After I imported that behavior to Ito, I kinda just... left it there. I felt it'd come in handy in the future, in some ways it has been! ...Only, it's being KINDA helpful.
    I don't know if it's me (which it most likely is), but even after replacing the code to make it use the Animation Manager, I can't seem to get Ito to properly attack. He tends to inflate and deflate properly, but attempting to attack yields nothing. I might need to redo the coding again for that behavior; I've had moments where Ito just up and decides to stop working. Who's to say the behavior potentially bugging itself is the main reason Ito isn't doing anything? I'll attempt my theory here sometime soon. But for now, just know that I lack progress of any kind right now. (I have a quota to fill with this blog.)

    Programming is a difficult task. Big features don't usually turn out correctly the very first time, and conflicting code tends to nullify this new, majestic piece of programming. That problem then leaves the amateur programmer feeling very stuck, and unwilling to move forward with their project until something is done about this evil problem. ...You can see what I'm getting at, right?
    Beyond the Tooop animation from last week, I haven't been able to progress with the project. In fact, the Tooop animation was the ONLY progress I made with it as of last week! (Aside from making a menu leading to the only two levels in the game so far, but that's not important.) After finding out (the hard way) that I couldn't make a specific part of Ito's whole frame attack the Tooop with no effect (other than Ito taking damage as if he wasn't attacking to begin with...), I felt the need to make a new animation all together. 
    The animation's gonna be an amusing one. Though I have yet to make the animation in question, I can at least mention how I'd do it. Simply, when I make the animation, I'll simply have to cut out the bottom left (or right, when Ito is facing the other direction), then I have Ito spawn another actor that contains the remaining quarter, which is what will deal the damage. (And I can imagine that I'll get a good laugh out of Ito falling apart when he attacks.)
    The only problem is, only now I've realized that Ito's regular swelling animation completely overrides the attacking one. I'm currently trying to figure out how to overcome that problem, but I feel like I shouldn't progress with the animation bug there. (We don't need an improper Ito!) The other problem that I can't figure out is how to mirror Ito's sprite. This should not be as difficult to pull off, however, and not as urgent.