QBob Progress Report #3

It’s been a couple of months since my last update, but my remake of QBob is continuing apace. I am in the middle of the most time consuming part of the project which is reworking all the graphics and animations. Many of the sprites will be fairly straightforward vectorizations of the original bitmaps, but there are several that are getting a complete overhaul.

I have become disenchanted with characters that were originally created as 3-D models using Caligari Truespace. The biggest culprit was Probe. His plastic texture and simple form seemed so out-of-place. You can see my new version above. I am quite happy with it. Faking movement in three dimensions using Flash kinda sucks, but I’ve managed to get this sprite animated quite nicely.

As I write this I am in the middle of a bit of a procrastination rut as I need to get the basic animation rig set up for the player character. I’m about seventy percent there but drawing this character from every angle is tricky. Let’s just say the original sprites fudged it a bit. I need to do this though. Once the basics are in place I will very quickly be able to reuse the source files to create XBob and be done with all the main player and enemy sprites. My goal is to be there by early next month.