The 5th Annual Gumball Report
I think I echo this sentiment quite well, “Please enjoy watching this blog document my drift towards going further and further off the schedule”. We are zealous, but he makes less promises than I do. Directly, at least.
All these gifs are displaying at 24 frames per second and.. Seem laggy to me? Things are a bit quicker and smoother in Spine, and I’m sure if I uploaded them as a video things would be better. These are sufficient for the purposes of this blog right now though, so!
There was no request for a walking animation but I did it anyway and I don’t really know why? But they exist now, I guess!
There is currently no foot-swapping going on for the north set. The lack of the foot swap makes the animations for this set look really goofy and off. Posted here for documentation purposes only, I guess! And to that end, there is no hand swapping going on on either one of them, which is something I thought I’d have done this week but got distracted when I decided to just pop my head into outfit town for a second..
Outfits are a little bit more tricky than I had initially thought. Not in terms of drawing them, though. With the bone animation every skin image that you’re seeing is attached to one of the bones. Spine has a built in skinning system, so I can swap one of those pieces with an article of clothing. However, swapping means that skin is no longer visible, so a low cut shirt or pair of shorts would be floating like a ghost was wearing them. So my plan is very similar to what I was doing back in our flash days. We’ll have a new set of bones that rest on top of the other bones for clothes. So the BodyBone and ShirtBone would be the same and move the same way, and when I want to see a different kind of shirt I will just swap it on. This.. works in theory, at least. I am in the process of setting it up in practice. And I really need to talk to Ron Gilbert about it.
click for bigger
There has also been a lot of debate (in my mind) about how to paint the character art. My initial plan was for some heavy lighting that looks super rad, but it would require me to do more than just flip the skin art for East/West (me being lazy). It would require more care on the part of map objects and the like as well to keep everything consistent. Having said that, I am not completely decided that I am not going this route, as a strong sense of lighting can really help to ground the world. Public debate ensues.
Here is a slightly more detailed version of what the road-map actually is.
Monsters are a case-to-case basis that I’ll talk about in greater detail once I have the appropriate information to be sharing (meaning, better experience with it).
Spine is also doing a second kickstarter with super awesome features I can’t wait for. Check it out if you need awesome stuff in your life. (and be happy that we saved $150 bones buying it when we did!)
