Cool idea?!: You might want to ask the maker of that girl-squirrel if you can use Her in your game? - there are also animations where she starrs; all made by that guy mentioned on the site I gave a link to - maybe he'd even be interested in helping realizing the graphics?! -Who knows

Better have something pretty Good to show him before asking, though - I have a feeling he's listened to a Lot of hairbrained schemes that people want him to help with

Yup - it helps a lot with ideas, advice and motivation - but you have to keep things rolling so people will stay interested! - Have a productive weekend!

will she be able to run while ducking? (squirrel crawlish?) also will she be able to walk on vertical platforms? (squirrels can climb them in this crawling motion but i've never seen one stand on two feet while climbing -- probably cause of that gravity thing or something but i have seen them stand on the ground) also didn't chip and dale have like a girlfriend or something?? -- on uhhh -- rescue rangers? you could go for that look but I dont remember at all what she looked like so you'd have to find a fan site or so.

cool -- i think using up stamina when climbing walls would be a good idea, but remeber squirrels can climb pretty fast...
and it shouldn't be able to climb on two feet it should be hugging the wall (duck running) while it climbs, at least that's my opinion, good luck.

Stamina Meter is in place. Glide is the only thing that reacts to it as of now. Had problems with hanging responding to running out of stamina. I'll be working on that tonight. It's a pretty cool feature I must say.

Camera y value now follows the player vertically. Will also be working on creating the background part of the map. Clouds, trees, plants, etc...

I will have a demo this weekend for anyone interested. It won't have the correct character sprites, but it will give the general gameplay idea. I'll post a link sometime this weekend.

what I mean is that the player shouldn't be able to stand sideways on the wall with only the two back feet touching -- i.e walking upright sideways up the wall, should not be allowed -- should be crawling up the wall/climbing

I've seen that episode. There you have a sexy one.

(sorry Rick, I just read the whole thread...)

I remarked that some guys do not agree with you, for example for the character style, or for the background landscape...

When i make games, i try to make them as generic as they can be. To do so, i feature some extra directories, containing wav sounds, graphics, etc (instead of a datafile).
Advantage : This gives me more freedom with dev. When i replace a wav with too low sound volume, or when i replace a graphic, it is taken into account immediately, as i is caught on execution.
Drawback : This involves more discipline (load gfx and then destroy them at end), and more error management. But they are always the same (ie: if graphic not found then give a standart ugly black rectangle allocated on the fly, in order not to crash the game, but make it work in 'reduced' mode)

Therefore i'd like to make a suggestion:
I saw that many people are most interested by your project, Rick, and are likely to help you.
So why don't you put online a 'very reduced' binary version with absolutely no graphics. So that people could test a very simple demo level.
Thus encouraging people to give you graphics, sounds, and levels(if they're formated in a nice text file) examples.

What i mean is:
1) A platform game involve a lot of work when talking about extra-engine stuff (ie: gfx, sound, level design)
2) YOU(Rick) are the best person to do your code, so do it!
3) If you are willing to feature your gfx, do it too, but you will realize as well that's a long & hard work. In this case put some gfx examples with the reduced demo.
4) Last but not least : allow people to give you gfx files; so specify sprites dimensions and other technical data you need to meet.

That's only a suggestion, you are not forced to do so, but as platforms are good but (very) long to design, what i can offer you is a little help on some gfx or sound. who knows..

Stamina now effects hanging. This created a bug which I haven't found yet. When I'm on a non edge tile, and slowly walk off edge and hold the hang button down, the players velocity get's set to 0, which causes a steady (slow) rate of falling.

Today I'll be working on the background & foreground tile map. I'll also be restructuring some of the code.

Johan Halmén
Squirrel needs arms.

anto80
As of now, the GFX on the demo will be in .bmp form. So anyone can alter them if they wish. The problem is the look and feel of having 10 different artists work on a game. I need the look to flow together. That's why when I have a good DEMO level created, I'm taking it over to Pixelation and asking an artist for some help. Hopefully I will get a bite. Anyway, I'll have a screenshot put up tonight, so all can see what it looks like. Right now I use spritelib for the GFX, so it looks like Happy Land kinda.

Idea: How about making some kind of diagram over the planned movement-states and their transitions? - it sounds like it might get pretty advanced, and then I think one of the most important things is knowing Exactly what y'all be wantin' to be fixin'

EDIT: HAH!!! Here's an online squirrel game for you!
http://www.mausland.de/games/squirrel2.htm - might be interesting to look at/pick placeholder graphics from (I haven't had time to try it yet myself)

TJ: I'm dumb!!

Just got another idea. What if there would be several different characters to choose from... Maybe even with different stats on stamina, agility etc. Perhaps something for the sequel though.

I wonder how you plan to have a platformer character which is both very detailed (human-like) and still playable onscreen.
Most platformers use a funny, stout, comic-like character, because the big head allows more recognisable features: Sonic has his head bigger than his body.
When a platformer uses a detailed human as character, the 'sprite' must be small enough so the player can see enough around him. facial features, in particular, become almost impossible to detail. (like in Jill of jungle, Contra, Castlevania, Metroid...)
In your game, if you want a detailed humanoid character, expect it to be very big onscreen, and animation art will take a lot of work to do.