the best known toolkit for the DS is "devkitpro". You can get it at http://www.devkitpro.org/. It is accompanied by small tutorials, including the famous NeHe lessons on OpenGL. For rapid game prototyping, minigames and such, you'll probably prefer installing the PALib over that, unless you  used to code on an Amiga or something alike back in the 90's.

The typical hardware setup will cost you ~60€, i'd say (it'll mostly depend on whether you have SD card already or not).

Quote from: PypeBros on May 20, 2008, 06:42:04 am

the walking animation should involve more of the legs, imho -- and maybe the lowest part of the torso as well.

Not quite sure what you mean, think you can explain it again more clearly?

(a) is the amount of animated legs in your current anim
(b) is what imho should be animated instead. since his sweat is obviously loose and covers his butt -- which will move too when he'll walk

Good post, zeid! The character really does need some unique flair. A specific way I think you could give Bilou some more personality is to simply add a mouth. That's not gonna solve the problem completely, but I think it'll help.

Edit (based on zeid's):


Hope that helps any.

I really love your edit. it's impressive to see how close it is to hand-drawn personnality, and the sub-pixel effect in the eyes opens many perspectives in the animation. And, yes, considering the way you dotted the mouth, i think i'll re-work my sprites to show it more (after all, Bilou *has* a mouth. It's just almost invisible when he closes it).

I realise now that my #1 error was probably that i wanted to stick to the 'good old' deep-blue of the EGA palette for Bilou's body, but that color is just too dark to let any detail appear, which forces things like mouth, etc. to be shown in plain black (which is both not nice and hardly readable on dark blue anyway).

(now i need to fix my Sprite Editor damn quickly and push those cute colors of yourszeid in my palette for some testing

Now, I won't lie to you, ball main characters are the absolute staple of 'hello, I am a programmer making a game for the first time!' types of games. They evolved directly from programmer placeholder art, and they're not a very good idea for a game character outside that context, Rayman legs and arms notwithstanding.

i didn't realised it was *that* common for hobby-developed games And, yes, i have to admit that sometimes i, too, hate having that ball as main character, as it's impossible to dress, and every non-trivial pose is a challenge to render properly.

I'll keep on practicing on other kind of characters for minigames, but i have a whole platformer to do for this guy, so i'll go on for this time, provide memorable monsters, movements and fun gameplay ... and we'll see.

(in case i sound "lazy gfx" here, think of it as "redoing-from-scratch-everytime coder" instead

Pypebros: Your character does have personality, but the problem is that visually he's not recognizable. Having a blue ball as your main character is fine and all, but it still needs some unique feature. Since he's pretty much made of circles, I think it'd be best if it was something angular. Perhaps...

bull-headed Bilou ... aouch 

Well, if you're talking of "recognizable" in marketting terms (such as any fool on earth can identify the 3 circles defining Mickey Mouse), i have to admit that Bilou would probably be the last thing picked up by a sales representative. Since i don't plan to sell the game (making it will be hard and long enough -- this is long-term hobby project), i don't care too much.

As for the "accessories" that could help give Bilou uniqueness, he used to have some kind of "sunglasses" with antenna and microphone so that he can keep in touch with the Stellar Convention paying him. They're supposed to be a power-up later in the game, but the last time i implemented it (well, i *really* sucked at gfx by that time), i found that he had more personnality without them than with them.

Just out of curiosity, is there something that makes the tiny furballs in "fury of the furries" recognizable in your terms ? Since that game is one of my top references in pixel art, if it is conceptually flawed, i prefer to learn it now