Day 4: animatilicious!

richard on 2009/09/02 12:51 of Easy

I spent at least half of today's effort working on animations. This consisted of creating the animation poses in Inkscape (tweaking the character design a little in the process) and saving off the PNGs for the animation frames. I then wrote the animation module for the game which doubled as an editor for figuring out the positioning of each frame. I ended up with quite nice walk animations going left and right.

The problems began when I added them to the game proper. The animations jumped too much from frame to frame (I was using the actual distance travelled for each frame's step to move the player). I tried making it smoother but it only worked going right and not left. Ugh. Eventually I gave in and I now use the same animation technique I've always used in platformers (hell, in anything) - a fixed frame rate of showing the frames and the animation is independent of the speed the player is actually moving. So the player moves smoothly but the character seems to slide across the landscape a little. It bugs me, and I'll be trying to fix it.

Once I got that out of the way I also worked on:
  1. animals
  2. yuck pools
  3. puffs when baddies are done for
  4. invulnerability after damage
  5. more level 1 tweakage
One of the animals is in today's screenshot:

(bigger)

The other animal is a rabbit. I like the bird better. I'm hoping to create more animals.

I also spent way too long debugging the rendering of the yuck pools. My own silly fault, of course.

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Comments

biccy on 2009/09/02 12:59:

Wow Richard this is look amazing! =D 

I'm keen to see the walk cycle you've made. 

killdream on 2009/09/02 15:17:

It's really looking good :D I liked the stylish graphics, they're lovely :3