Lara Croft - Progression in Fighter Factory

July has been a crazy month with Lara Croft; some disappointments, others delights. The most noteworthy aspects are that all of the animations I listed for her are complete. Her basic movements, attacks and specials are all in the game, along with most of her sound effects. However I need to go back and work on more animations that I expected. A lot more actually. And since I have split days off at my job now, progress has stifled quite a bit, but I think I'm doing pretty well maintaining my patience haha. At least I can step away from it more. Her backflip works better than I had hoped for as well.

Aside from the animations, I hit three, very worrisome snags with the coding. One, both hypers will have to be helpers. Those are no fun to make. Two, Lara moves pretty slow with her walk. The walk is not completely useless, as I want to keep it for one of her victory animations, but I need a faster animation. Maybe I'll repurpose the running animation and make her jump or leap for the double tap forward. The biggest concern is a bug somewhere I've found in her .CMD file by isolating the problem as much as possible. But it essentially means Lara will rebound from any attack instantly. The only solution I can think of is to recode the entire .CMD section by section from kung fu man's base code. That's a chore but hopefully it will fix it.

This month, since I'm kind of stuck from coding the character until I have more of the animations I need for Lara. Some of them just need to be rethought to fit a better method of combat. Her firearms have too much reach and are slow, but her melee attacks are too short. Lara feels very rigid compared to my other characters, and a lot of animation work is still vital. I'd say I have about 8 new animations I have to make at least. Part of me hates it, but part of me is a bit relieved to get away from the coding and still do art stuff for Lara after a break from photoshop, when moving on to Fighter Factory. I'm already feeling the burn out like I did with Auron, but I still have plenty of time to finish her by October. If things go smoothly enough, I hope to be about 90% done with her this month. If so, I can make her trailer in September.