NEW! Character sprites

After working over the holiday weekend, I coughed up the following character sprites. They are not exactly what I would want to see in the
game, but they should do the job for now. Perhaps later we can include better sprites. This new set is in color, though I can make it
monochrome easily enough if we decide to stick with a colorless image for the player. For the NPCs I can take this set and make red,
blue, etc sets like the ones previously, where there is only shadowed detail.

The grid is set up at 42 x 42 pixels, with each row a compass point. There are 2 "stepping" images (positions 1 and 3), a standing/middle
step image (position 2), a shooting image (position 4). In row 2 position 5 there is a "oh crap I got shot" image, and the other images in
column 5 are sitting positions. I'm not sure how the legs will look in restaurant booths, so we might need to fudge around with the images
then. Each image has an alpha channel blend around the edges, so that might screw up Internet Explorer, though in game it will work fine.

OLD NPCs and the Player Character

After about 4 hours of tinkering (not counting 2 or 3 this afternoon running in vain circles), I finally got something that looks acceptable!
Here are the player graphics in animation strips, though I will be curious to see how the animation works in real-life. That's when I'll finally
see if the movement is convincing enough.  One thing I experimented with was to drop shadows onto the floor under the character, and the
results looked surprisingly realistic. I'll add them to these graphics if they work out well as they are now.

These graphics still have the vague nebulous look as my old one, simply because my experiments with colored skin and clothing were less
than pleasing. Moreover, the ambiguity allows the mind's eye to fill in details as the player sees them, rather than a gyrating lump of
multi-colored pixels. My theory is that if you give the player 100% of the details, that's all they will see. Give them 50%, and their
imagination will do the rest of the work. `Sort of reminds me of Infocom's advertising for Zork a bit, when they said:
"The world's best graphics generator is your own imagination."

Grid: 35x35 pixels.  Each animation begins on left-foot forward. Last four poses in the row are the standing still poses.  There is an alpha-
channel blend around the edges of the image.



= the animation in play. It might take some effort to get the walk to match the speed of movement, so it doesn't look like the player
is thrashing his legs in the air.

POD IMAGES
A while back I drew some pod images, and never posted them. So...here they are! You'll notice that the lighting/shadowing are properly
rendered as the pod turns.

NPC POD IMAGES
In the city parking lots, pods randomly came and went, but the problem in the Atari version of the game was that the player's pod looked
exactly like the NPC pods. If you parked your pod in the parking lot, you risked losing it since it looked just like all the others. So I drew
some NPC pods, that all look different than the Sundog pod.

                             

These are screen shots of the Sundog Resurrection galaxy. This is an updated model, to create a somewhat spiral galaxy look. This is
largely to facilitate the isolation of the original stars at one end of the galaxy, so that this traps the player in the original stars - we
don't want to overwhelm the player at first. Once the player gets the engine upgrade so they can visit Enlie, they can keep hopping
and explore the whole galaxy.

SCREENSHOT OF THE ORIGINAL SYSTEM -  click thumbnail below to view.

This is a screenshot of the opening screen.