I'm a little late to start the blog from the beginning, so heres a quick synopsis of development so far:

I need to create a game with an aspect of 3D, I have always loved the MMO Legend of Mir, and how it was created from 3D models, rendered into a series of sprites.

I found this tutorial on YouTube that tought me how to convert a 3D model and animation into a series of sprite frames:

Using this, I imported 'Wizards for Battle Polyart' (https://www.fab.com/listings/f17e8f86-b7b2-4840-9e77-5c57bfa30764) asset pack into the project and began to create my sprites.

I came across an issue with image overlaying (robe and staff texture) and had to create a stupid pipeline to get them working. (I will create a blog detailing this trials and tribulations of this endevour)

What you see above is a utility tool i created to compose all the animation frames into a single library. This was done for 2 main reasons; firstly, I wanted to attach some meta data to the images. As they were exported at 500x500 i wanted to trim the blank rows and columns, this is fine for bottom and top, but removing the rows and colums from the top and left side would effect the placement of the image. The second reason for the custom library was efficienty, having thousands of images in a folder will be a nightmare for the system and loading all those images into the game would take an absolute age. Instead, I can seek to a location in my library, load a chunk of data to memory and use pointers to get access the correct data in memory.

The game will be created with C++ and SFML but due to what i want to achieve, I will also need to create some utility tools which I will do using C# as I am more familiar with that language.

The utility tools will serve as a way to build the game content, such as custom file formats to store assets, level objects, and maps.

More meaningful blog posts will follow.