I spent the week kind of doing the wrong thing. While finishing up the art for the animations and animating them, I for some reason was using my old animations as a per-frame model for my new animation. Why would I even. This is the old sheet:
I guess in my head everything would be faster if I based every pose of an existing set I already made. And while that’s kind of true, a 1:1 conversion looks mostly dreadful. I wasn’t playing to the strength of the new bone system, which has mostly been remedied since. If we don’t have Spine purchased by next week, I’ll fraps up a gif to show my progress on this. I still have battle animations to animate which I’m expecting by mid-week and then I’ll make the final decision, though it’s basically a sure thing at this point.
Other than the one base outfit for the male, I won’t be spending any more of my time right now on the hero animations. I’ll be working my way to getting 2 enemies (at least) finished up animation wise, and then heading to UserInterface town. Everything is going pretty good (and quick!) for the first time in a long time, it almost feels like the old days. Kinda.
Wasn’t around last week because of Animefest in Dallas. Good times, you should have been there! Maybe you were, even.
Doing the final stress tests in Spine to make sure everything is working well. All the bones are in place and named accordingly. They are simple to adjust down the road if we ever need to, which I’m absolutely in love with. My main issue now is coming from the art itself. Leh gasp!
These are my roughs for testing purposes. They are a little much in terms of size (the image above is actually reduced by 25%), so when I paint the real thing they will probably be reduced by at least 50% (which still leaves them at about eight times larger than we’ll ever need them to be). Drawing them is fine, it’s trying to figure out what happens behind pieces and how much of them I need to draw that is hurting my brain for no reason. That, and when to swap an image for a different one. It’s just about all situated.
I’ve been thinking about what this means for outfits. The old flash style more or less required one piece of clothing that was used for both idle and running animation. I’m in the mind set now of a different set of art for idle/running. That might change once everything is in place and it might end up being OK to go back to that old style. I won’t be able to say with certainty until the running animation is completed if those pieces will be usable for idle or not. I’m also really interested in how much can be reused for attacks and battle animations. It’s like I’m playing some weird modular video game where more pieces means slightly more work.
A friend recommended a good book that’s helped make me more accepting of ‘the way things currently are’ in regards to real job/hobby job. Thanks, friend! And book!
As a disclaimer, I am nobody’s programmer. I have only the slightest idea what I’m doing here, so take everything here at face value.
Thus far I’ve just been talking about the work in flash itself, but I mentioned before that these images will be saved and imported into the game as pngs (hereby referred to as “old-school style”). So how do I plan on doing this?
What we have here is the exact same movie clip eight times. What I ended up doing is telling flash to freeze each of these different clips at a different frame (1-8), and to hide everything that isn’t what we’re wanting to see. So for example, we’ll show the shirt, how it is in every different frame, and hide everything else. This creates the entire set that we’ll then save and import into the game itself. This part of the system is basically finished, I am just fumbling my way through an actual save button (because a print-screen is for chumps). I’m also trying to work through the obvious conflict that you can see with the shirt and the far arm. The way things are layered in flash isn’t the flat image you’re getting to see here. I have a few options for fixing this, the most likely of which would involve me just editing the flat png image slightly before import. It seems like work, but a little bit of erasing is going to be a lot easier than demanding our best-friend programmer layer each piece individually, not to mention he’d probably murder me.
The part that’s missing mostly is that they aren’t lined up properly yet. I’ll have to figure out out of the entire set what the widest point is, and what the tallest point is for the animation, and then make sure every frame is basically centered to that standard.
This still isn’t the blog update that you need, or that I want to be writing. I’ve gone from broken to busy to missing. In my infinite wisdom I managed to ruin almost all of my separated of groups for different categories and am scrambling to get them back where they need to be. Every piece lines up like it’s supposed to, it’s just a matter of finishing the directional break up (again), animating the idle pieces, and redrawing a couple “broken” leg pieces.
Join us next week when I get my life together and show you a finally finished animation.
I promised you finished idle animations today, but it looks like I’m a liar. I lie, sometimes. Often, really.
So I had just about finished all my completely redrawn pieces for idle animations when I realized “Wait.. I can just use some of the pieces and redraw the ones that don’t work!”. Why this didn’t dawn on me earlier, and why no one questioned my logic at any point in time is beyond me.
While I said the idle animations aren’t finished, what I meant is that the only thing that isn’t finished about them is that they don’t move yet, and manipulating the pieces for animation isn’t that difficult. So how many pieces do I have to redraw? Ten. That’s right, only ten! For South/East, it’s both feet and a hand, and for North/West it’s just the feet. Exciting, and way better than 76 extra pieces every time I make a new article of clothing.
I also have my current ‘sk-test’ button sitting there. It’s purpose is to make sure layering is working properly with different outfits. You’ll notice a few issues here and there with it. The issues come from my initial set of apathy clothing being a little lose, and as I manipulated it to hide the under-skin, sometimes parts of other sets that weren’t the same size would bleed incorrectly. This is another easy fix, it just takes a little bit of time. Once it’s finished properly now it will never be an issue again.
You’ll also notice that the bottom two animations clothing are currently just mirrored versions of the above two. This existed just for these testing purposes and is on it’s way out right now. The chest tattoo that says HAWK will no longer saw WAH after this update. Soak it in.
Goal for next week: I’ll be posting a mini update this Wednesday talking about clothing and makin’ outfits, and by Sunday we should have a few sets of fully animated junk to deal in.
