Superhero Game WIP

sman118 Aren't you glad we have Spriter? ;p Makes tweaking anims soooo easy!

— E Bear Yeah it's making good progress. Should be a fun game when it's done eh!

I'm not using Spriter for the player animations, though I do plan to use it for larger bosses and some enemies. I'm using Toonboom animate pro for the animation, but it essentially works the same.

Ah yeah.. I remember you saying! Still easier than pixelling each frame ;p

Oof, this is getting complicated. But not TOOOOO complicated. At least that's what I keep telling myself. I'm knee deep in my implementation of the new animation system and its actually working. At least so far.

During flight, I have the animation starting at the "Start" animation and then transitioning to the "loop" animations. It will stay on the "loop" animations until the player stops. Then it will begin again with the "start" animations.

I ran into a couple problems at first. 1) 8-way movement doesn't have a "on moved" trigger. It just has "is moving". The problem with that is that is just constantly repeating. I need it to know that after one of the starting animations played, the animation condition goes from "Start" to "Loop". Luckily, they have a "trigger once" event that I threw into a sub event. Worked like a charm.

2) I'm dumb and had my syntax wrong. I mentioned in a previous post the names of each flying animation is just the combination of 4 different variables. I was using the + sign to combine those instead of the "&" sign. Simple enough when I researched the original tutorial I found on picking animations that way.

Next up is triggering the stopping animations and then animating all of the remaining starting and stopping animations. I hate myself more and more for including that cape.

Till next time,

-Ben

Yeah adding complex things like the cape will only add more work. In my Slappy Burd game, I did originally have ideas planned to animate the sporran.. then decided against it thinking about having to animate the motion when the player punched or kicked. So glad I did ;p

But tbh, once you've done all the animations for the cape, it's gonna look so sweet. Little details like the cape will add much more character to the game.

procrastinator , I agree. Its a lot of work, but hopefully in the end it will be worth it. Just this afternoon I got my Animation States all set up. The animations aren't all in, but it works. And that is a huge victory. So the way it works is when you begin to move the state is "Start". When any of the "start" animations end, it changes the Animation State to "Loop". The loop animations will play for any flying angle until you stop moving. Actually, its triggered by none of the arrow keys being down while a loop animation is playing. Then it changes the Animation State to "Stop". When any of the stop animations end, it changes the state to "idle". That puts you back to square one.

You can test it out at the link below. Full animations are for left and right. But if you start flying at left or right and then fly around, you'll see the animations all loop until you stop while going left or right. Hopefully that makes sense. Press F to trigger flying. Arrow keys move.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/56104169/SuperheroGame8-15-14/index.html

Cape looks great so far! The hard work is paying off

Nice anim states structure too.

Back with a quick update. Things are still moving along nicely as I've taken a break from the hero to start working on "those that he shall save". Namesly, the Civilians/NPC's. I had recently started playing closer attention to the some of the blog posts and realized that all of my well compressed PNG's were being converted to 32-bit. This was causing huge leaps in the amount of memory I was using compared to my download size.

So where I was played with the idea of a using skeletal animation for my NPC's, it has now become a necessity. Lucky for me, I'm loving Brashmonkey's Spriter and thing it will do just the trick.

I've mapped out some the the character "states" that i want and plan to build those animations in Spriter. You can head over to my Facebook page and see plenty of my tests in video form here: https://www.facebook.com/needyourdisease

I'm hoping to have more soon as I'm planning on tackling Spriter's character packs and getting those randomized. See you then.

-Ben

Now that I have a little Spriter experience, I was wanting to redo the animation where they are being held by the player. This led me to reevaluate my current run cycle. First, the torso was a little stiff so I definitely needed to add some twisting in. Second, for the civilian art to lay correctly on top of the player art, they need to be slightly towards camera. Very tricky. So I went into my original run animation file in Toon Boom Animate Pro and started changing things up. I need to correct (and possibly redraw) the cape and I should be done. Then I can make the version for holding a civilian. Fingers crossed.

Be sure to "like" my Facebook page for more consistent updates: https://www.facebook.com/needyourdisease

Thanks!

-Ben

I've been away long enough. Time for a quick update. Since I was last on the forum, I've become much more comfortable with the Spriter object and have completely embraced using it for all NPC's. I've also started creating new versions of the player animations for when you are holding a Civilian. The Spriter object then overlaps the player to give the illusion of holding. I'm also animating cycles for the NPC's to react to the angle the player is flying.

Hopefully the animations won't take too long. I really wish I would have done them at the same time as the normal ones, but I was just too eager. More to come.

Also, my animation list is getting a little crazy.

-Ben

http://www.needyourdisease.com

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