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Cutscenes

It’s been a quiet few weeks on the Puny Human front. My weekends have been spent jumping down a cutscene rabbithole.

I wanted an introduction sequence to set the scene and show how our feline protagonist ended up being abducted by aliens.

Energize the Abduct-o-Beam!

There’s not much spare memory to play with, so it’s a case of reusing as much code and graphics as I can.

Here’s the intro as it stands. There is a lot of graphical tweaking to do, but the basics are all in place now:

It ended up taking me a few attempts, and way too much time. I kept rewriting, reorganising, and rearranging things, but I was never happy with how the code was implemented - it always felt overcomplicated and clunky.

In the end I settled for a very simplistic VM to run cutscene scripts, and it turned out really well. The scripts are compact, it’s flexible and quick to fiddle with timing and ordering. And I can reuse it for some little in-game cutscenes I have in mind - hooray!