9:59
Was up at 4:00 am with my body threatening to get sick this morning. Please no! I have only seven days left to work on this (including today) and other things going on. There is much to do!
I implemented tunnels leading to different NPCs last night.
A couple things I could work on now.
- The doorway with “the signs” leading into the room with the big bad. I think we’re all forgetting that this is part of the vision and an important one at that!
- A character animation prototype. This will inform Flavian’s work on the character drawings so it’s pretty important. I don’t know how this is gonna work either so.
I guess it’s the character animations first.
Okay, from what I know there are a few ways we could do this.
Each frame of the animation is a drawing and I use an AnimatedSprite to play through them like a video.
Break the character up into parts (head, torso, arms, legs) and use tweens to move the parts. I can also switch out different versions of the same part depending on need. Far less work overall. Possible to have more detail in the drawings. There’s a danger of the movement looking really janky, though.
I think we gotta try for number two.
Oh, and there’s also the skeleton with deformations.
10:50
Watched some YouTube videos. Skeletons and IK targets are used with the body parts for animation. Can also use deform meshes but maybe that’s for another time. I’ll start with the skeleton and learn how to do that.
One question is, how do I swap out assets mid-animation?
This thread had some info on that: https://forum.godotengine.org/t/2d-skeleton-parts-swap/57533/4
If the parts are similar enough I can just swap the texture. Otherwise I might want to have separate parts with separate skeletons and enable/disable each as needed. Neat.
K, so these are the assets I have so far.
Can’t really use these for the animation since the poses are wrong but maybe I can Frankenstein something based on some assets online.
Oya where was that list of animations I may or may not need?
PC
- walk (with uncertainty and fear)
- tip-toe past something horrible
- run
- open door
- peek through door
- go through door (door closes)
- look around uncertainly
- talking
- hide
- come out of hiding
- flip out
- tense up in apprehension
- loosen up in relief
- fear reactions
- step back in horror
- vomit
- fold arms across stomach and double over
- jump back
- shoot the gun
- crawl
- collapse with their back against a door
- jump over debris on the floor
- trip on something on the floor, get up (running start?) Violent NPC
- walk
- run
- hesitate and look different directions
- flex muscles in frustration
- laugh maniacally
- open and walk through door
- reveal hiding spot and kill PC
- attack PC
- (if PC hides and only other door is big bad) approaches door then walks backwards shaking head in terror. turns around and leaves. NPCs
- < specific to encounter >
I guess walk animation will be full side view and then when the character stops they sit in a 3/4 pose and we can better see their facial expression? I guess that adds one more position, though, so not ideal.
Don’t Starve Together just uses the full side pose.
14:39
I’ve been working with the skeletons, IK, and animation player in Godot. It’s uhh… painful.
I got the bones rigged up. The IK works for some limbs but not for others. I move the IK target around and it only affects the first bone and not the second. Or in another case, the scale seems completely off and I have to place the IK like 5px away from the first bone’s origin to get any bend in the joints.
I gave up on troubleshooting that and started animating. Setting keyframes in the animation player is super time consuming. And I can feel carpal tunnel coming on just tryna select all those little keyframes and rotate joints into place. Doesn’t help that I don’t even know how to do a decent walk cycle in the first place!
Another horrible part of the UI is that when you click on 0.5 seconds, say, in the animation timeline, it might actually select 0.47 or something. Then when I move the bones around and create a keyframe it creates a new one and there’s a jump from 0.47 s to 0.5 s in the animation. Not what I wanted.
So yeah, working with all that was bad enough to drive me to look for alternatives. At first I looked at the possibility of using other software but I don’t have a drawing tablet so that’s a big problem.
Then I saw some hand drawn animation workflows and that was pretty appealing. Something I’d considered before for other projects, too. Not sure if I should be spending game jam time on getting that working but I already started. Got a table. Got a webcam pointing at the table.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Or-5fyMG7ek&t=160s
I don’t have a peg bar or animation paper but maybe I can make do with a binder for now. Might have to fix the registration on the images but I’m not planning on high framerate work. I just need poses that relate to each other well enough.
15:36
I’m definitely losing the plot here. I got a little pencil and paper animation setup but it’s gonna be ages before I can draw well enough to make use of it. What was I going for? Draw the poses that I need and send those to Flavian so he can redraw them with character details?
Would Flavian even want that?
I’ve got to go now, maybe for the rest of the day, unforch. So I guess I’ll have time to think and sort out what the heck I’m doing here.