Yays, dissertation finished! now back to final major. I have been experimenting with different fun ways to collect the types of orbs within the game. Here is a demonstration of the character harvesting orbs by holding down a key, but to make it more of a challenge within itself, the orbs will move at different speeds as the and the player can't attack while absorbing the orbs. It works similar to Resident Evil's 'Run and Gun' feature that only lets the player do one or the other, the player can start to absorb but they will be vulnerable to attacks if they are. Orbs such as the ones that recharge magic and health will move slower, but experience orbs will absorb a lot faster.
There will be some enemies that require you to block or evade their attacks while you absorb, but when the orbs are dropped they will disappear if they are not collected in time, which will create some challenge for players not to lose any of the orbs gained. From the clip the orbs are collected and presented in the HUD, when enough orbs are collected to fill the circle guages(types of orbs are differentiated by colour, the player will be notified on what they are at the start of the game), they will be able to execute more powerful attacks or level up if their experience gauge is filled. so yeahh, I hope this game mechanic will make the game more of a crazy-ass fun experience.
I have created the animations for the red, green and blue orbs in ParticlesIllusion 3. The orb is exported as PNGs and imported into flash. I've only included a small amount of frames to be exported as PNGs because pngs are more performance intensive if they all the frames have alphas. The frames will be placed in sequence of the animation within a movieclip. I was having problems with looping a seemless particles effect in ParticlesIllusion, I have found it easier to make a looping animation for the orbs by reversing the sequence of pngs in the movie clip but not to include the 1st and last frames of animation when reversing back the animation.
