It’s looking like Spine works for everything we need it to work for, and Hawk imported their test project with none difficulty. I took the time to learn it’s hot-keys and some of the less straight-forward things it does to help make a game plan for animations. The changing of outfits was the things I was most concerned with, but I am pretty sure it’s doable. I am not entirely sure what all can be done on the programming end of it, or if everything we can do mix & match wise has to be clearly visible in each combination in Spine. But just because I spent so much time in Spine doesn’t mean I forgot about swamp week! No, more importantly, how do we send swamp week off in a manner most deserving of the mighty marsh lands and our incredible journey through it?
Since my initial plan for enemies wasn’t to use the concept art I created, I ended up having to redo art to make that concept art usable in the game itself. Now that I know that I will need to be layering it and moving things about, I’ve started painting the concept art in the appropriate layers. It’s taken a little bit of getting used to, but nothing major at all. As a matter of fact, it’s been a bit of fun. Unfortunately, the things I painted this week I all hated, and this is what I ended up hating the least.
I haven’t animated anything this week. We are in the process of switching from the png sheet animations to either using Spriter or Spine, with a leaning towards Spine. I’m putting animating these things in flash off until I know what direction we’re taking program wise. I spent the majority of my week going back and forth between the two trying to learn them and see which one is better for us. Switching will also mean that I’ll have to re-bone all of the previous running animations in the new program. It shouldn’t take much time to convert my work over, since I’ve already done most of the hard work on figuring out how the animation needs to look. It will actually end up being way better after the switch, too. Flash is kind of a nightmare for what I was doing with it. The good news though, is since everything has to be re-rigged for a new program, we might as well just paint the heroes and their outfits too. Every day’s a good day when you paint.
Geeze, is it day 3 of Swamp Week already!? So exciting! So let’s talk more about enemies! How are they going to work? What are we doing here?
We start with the concept art. My initial plan was to draw the concept art all painterly and what not, and then redraw it with a black outline and color it in flash so the enemies would match the heroes. After I did a test of it though, we all kind of hated it. And, what’s more, is it’s actually slightly less work to just animate the concept art than it is to redraw everything and then break it apart in flash. So, I refined the concept sketch some and made a sheet of it for importing
Then, I put the pieces together in flash and animate it. I decided to make my life a little more complex and built a little previewer for idle/attack/hurt. I’ll probably need to add a ‘cast’ for magic enemies, but we’ll see exactly what I need. It’ll also be really simple for me to import the next set of enemies into this framework and make them adhere to the standard I set. I also have little to no idea how I am going to be exporting these for the game itself. Though, right now I don’t care a whole horrible lot. I’ll figure something out, so in the mean time I’ll just enjoy the ‘holy shit this actually works!’ high.
Whoo. What a crazy Swamp Week so far! I can’t wait to see how the rest of this week turns out!
Swamp Week powers on! I did more boring work on the background, tedious tedious, then sketched up monsters until I got tired (which is right now)
(Background lightened to see the concept art clearer)
What is the ever-pressing goal of swamp week? Simple! To get as much swamp related material as I can done by Friday. I believe we can plow through a decent chunk of the swamp this week, so long as nothing catches fire. The over-arching principal is that I work on what I feel like working on, but it has to be swamp related. So instead of being unmotivated and paining through weeks of animation bases, I can do whatever feels right that day. And swamps feel so right.
