Elpis 2D

I've been absent from blogging for some time now, and this I choose to blame on the lack of interesting things to say or willingness to say it. Anyway, I haven't ceased development and this post will bring the blog up to date with what I've been doing on Elpis.

The focus for the past little while has been on a 2D puzzle platformer game, or rather, the engine and script features required by this game. While Elpis was originally a 3D engine, I was fond enough of the framework to add 2D features to it instead of making a specialized 2D engine from scratch.

One feature we are toying with for this game is having multiple scenes displayed and semi-active at the same time. At first, I thought this might be problematic (being that we all like as large a display area as possible), but it's grown on me. The practicality of this feature is to allow the user to quickly swap between scenes to solve puzzles that take place in multiple game areas simultaneously, and to display to the user what effects he is having in each scene when interacting with another. We are aware that this feature has very limited uses, but it may prove effective as a puzzle element.

A small list of features that have been added for this game:

• Simultaneously active scenes
• Tiling 2D scene elements
• Animated sprites
• Basic 2D physics (simple, scalable, collisions using circles and rectangles as bounding volumes, sprite velocity)
• Sepia toning (post processing effect)
• Scene layer scrolling at varying speeds
• Sprite animation frame audio triggers (ie, frame 3 of hero's run animation triggers the 'footfall' audio clip)
• Audio playback using XACT

As for the game itself, there will be a dedicated post for it, but here's an image of a scene.

A conceptual throw together of one of the potential scenes for the game.