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[Spennerino]

I'd go even further:



The upwards motion is faster so I use a smear to convey that. The wings-down frame has a second frame to "overshoot" the animation and prepare for the upwards movement. Total 5 frames (the body movement might be a little too exaggerated)

I recommend this great video on animation:

Are your 5 frames all equal length? I've actually seen that video, I agree its a really great resource. I'm sort of adding on one new animation principle to the next once I learn how to do each.

Your example will help me a lot for fixing my bat animation which I know needs a lot of work. Thank you so much! I have never considered doing a smear by erasing pixels in the limb but it looks really good. Is your example from Copy Girl or some other project you've done? Or did you make it really quick as an example for me?

Thank you again for your help! <3 Copy Girl

-Spencer

[7Soul]

Are your 5 frames all equal length? I've actually seen that video, I agree its a really great resource. I'm sort of adding on one new animation principle to the next once I learn how to do each.

Your example will help me a lot for fixing my bat animation which I know needs a lot of work. Thank you so much! I have never considered doing a smear by erasing pixels in the limb but it looks really good. Is your example from Copy Girl or some other project you've done? Or did you make it really quick as an example for me?

Thank you again for your help! <3 Copy Girl

-Spencer

The frames are equal, but there are 2 similar frames for the wings-down part

I just made it right now. It reminded me of a long time ago where I also saw a bat animation that looked really cool so I opened it on my pixel program to see how it was done, and this is what I learned from it. Feels like I learned 50% of what I know now from that one bat animation

[Spennerino]

The frames are equal, but there are 2 similar frames for the wings-down part

I just made it right now. It reminded me of a long time ago where I also saw a bat animation that looked really cool so I opened it on my pixel program to see how it was done, and this is what I learned from it. Feels like I learned 50% of what I know now from that one bat animation

Not 100% done polishing the frames yet but I redid most of it and i'm pretty pleased with the improvement.
I didn't go for the smear though, felt pretty drastic to me for this particular animation. The extra frame to add to the hold at the end is excellent though for how little work it was.

Thanks again for your help!



-Spencer

[Spennerino]

"The primary concept of the game is that you play as a mime and any human enemy you defeat will grant you the power to copy their job class."

Update 3: Job Classes

I just finished making the Time Mage class for my game and I wanted to quickly mention how these classes are going to hopefully work. My plan for the job classes is for them to act like Kirby abilities. Whenever you defeat an enemy who is using one of the job classes they will drop it like a mario power up. Once you collect the class, the mime will copy it and you will be able to use the power until you get injured. Once you get injured you will drop the class and you will have to collect it again.

I am hoping that this is will be fun for any of the 1 - 4 players modes. In multiplayer I am hoping that a group would end up with a diverse team of job classes naturally and as they work their way through a level they will get hurt and end up trading classes with each other over time due to losing them and their teammates picking them up.

Each class will give the mime 1 or 2 simple abilities to help out with the levels. I am planning on implementing 8 total job classes and then introducing one new class for each new world.

Here are the first 6:

Knight, Dragoon, Black Mage
Assassin, Archer, Time Mage

The remaining 2 job classes are still undecided and I am trying to choose between splitting up the Black Mage class into elements, a Berserker, a Monk, a Axe Boomerang class, or a Greatsword class.

-Spencer

[Spennerino]

Update 4: Job and Enemy Art

Just some more pixel art in this update. I am going to transition off of art and back to programming soon.

I changed the design of my Mage to be more of a Wizard

Blob starting enemy animation

Chic Khan

I thinking this will be a sort of tutorial boss for the game

-Spencer

[7Soul]

Is that a chicken with fat man tits?

Well chicken do technically have breasts... right?

[Spennerino]

Is that a chicken with fat man tits?

Well chicken do technically have breasts... right?

Haha yes exactly. 

I was going for sorta a cross between Fat Buddha and Genghis Khan. When I animate him i'm probably going to add a robe or some armor or something to his design to add to his monk style levitation.

[Spennerino]

Update 5: Tools and Workflow

Today I would like to quickly talk about the tools and workflows that I will be using for the creation of Mimix.

I will be using Unity as my game engine. It is not the best engine for 2D game creation, but it is the engine I am most familiar with.

For map editing I will be using Tiled and then I will be using Tiled2Unity to import the maps into unity to make my life easy.

For art asset creation I start with Photoshop to get my basic ideas down and then I switch over to Aseprite to clean up my pixel art and animate it. Once I become more experienced with Aseprite I might do 100% of the art with it and drop Photoshop entirely. Once the art is done, I use an animation importer to automatically set up the animations and art for Unity.

Because of these tool choices, both the art and map workflows are really nice and effortless to get my assets working in the game.

My next update will probably be about multiplayer now that all of the basic multiplayer elements have been added to the project. Stay Tuned!

-Spencer

[Spennerino]

Update 6: Render Modes

I spent the day working on supporting multiple resolutions while still maintaining pixel perfection which can be a difficult task in Unity. This was achieved by using a render texture set to the scale of the intended internal resolution.

All resolutions from 640x360 and up are now supported with pixel perfection. Stretch rendering modes were also added for displays with really strange resolutions. Since the pixels will start looking really funky at certain times in this mode I also added a bilinear filtering mode so that things look much less jittery when using odd settings. All of this will be completely exposed so that players can choose the best options for their setup.

The pixel perfect mode works by allowing the camera to scale without the screen output changing size. Once the camera gets large enough to fit a 2x, 3x, ect pixel size it automatically snaps the output to the new resolution.

The aspect stretch mode doesn't care about pixel sizes and just stretches to fit the resolution no matter what size it is but it still maintains the originally intended 16:9 aspect ratio.

The third render mode I added is a true stretch mode that doesn't care about anything and just stretches to whatever aspect ratio the player wants.

The final feature that I added today was adding an additional render buffer range to the render texture. This will allow me to move around the render texture within the output camera for things like screen shake without having to show black edges when it moves.

More info and code here!

-Spencer

[You Blister My Paint]

The render texture stuff is pretty interesting.  So if I understand correctly, the player sets the resolution in some settings menu and you just resize the texture? I haven't used Unity for much desktop development, but doesn't Unity have some built in configuration options for resolution? If so how does this interact with this method? Are you using the new Canvas UIs and does that work well with render textures?

[Spennerino]

The render texture stuff is pretty interesting.  So if I understand correctly, the player sets the resolution in some settings menu and you just resize the texture? I haven't used Unity for much desktop development, but doesn't Unity have some built in configuration options for resolution? If so how does this interact with this method? Are you using the new Canvas UIs and does that work well with render textures?

Hi!

You can either use unity's build in resolution settings which happen before the game launches or you can make your own custom resolution changing menu in game. Making your own custom menu is really nice because it allows player to change settings on the fly during gameplay, as well as allowing you to make the menu match the style of the game visually.

A camera updates the render texture every frame with a resolution of 640 by 360 (a resolution I chose). Then there is a quad with a material on it that has the texture assigned to it. This quad is what I change the size of based on the resolution options to keep it pixel perfect or not. Then there is a second camera that outputs to the computers display which is the actual resolution that the game runs at.

I get the resolution from the output camera and then configure everything downwards so it doesn't matter if the settings come from unity or if I change them myself. All of the GIF's above are just me manually re-sizing the Game view in free aspect.

It sounds much more complicated than it is haha. Hopefully that makes sense.

The Canvas UI stuff can either be applied to the camera that generates the render texture, or it can be layered on top of the render texture and captured by the output camera. What the camera sees is configured by the culling mask setting of each camera. It can be handled however you want, it is very customizable.

If you are curious or are trying to implement something similar for yourself I can post some code snippets to help. Just let me know.

-Spencer

[Shysteria]

I don't have much to say, but please do finish and release this game. I love your pixel art and the animation is incredibly fluid. Keep up the good work!

[Spennerino]

I don't have much to say, but please do finish and release this game. I love your pixel art and the animation is incredibly fluid. Keep up the good work!

Thank you! I love hearing positive feedback, it means a lot.

I am trying my best to complete it. I'm clocking in about 20 hours a week after a full time job so that I can release a demo as soon as possible. I hope that you will try the demo when the time comes. 

[You Blister My Paint]

If you are curious or are trying to implement something similar for yourself I can post some code snippets to help. Just let me know.

-Spencer

I actually was playing with technique myself not too long ago. Didn't think of the possibilities for setting custom resolutions in game, that's a nice trick. I was using it in order to create a ultra low res look in games.I added it to the space ship tutorial just as a test, haven't actually found a use for it in a game yet:



There was this rather amazing little horror demo called Hide that inspired me to try and recreate the look. The designer was using render textures as well.

Thanks for the post on the subject. Game looks great so far, keep up the informative DevLogs!

[Spennerino]

I actually was playing with technique myself not too long ago. Didn't think of the possibilities for setting custom resolutions in game, that's a nice trick. I was using it in order to create a ultra low res look in games.I added it to the space ship tutorial just as a test, haven't actually found a use for it in a game yet:

There was this rather amazing little horror demo called Hide that inspired me to try and recreate the look. The designer was using render textures as well.

Thanks for the post on the subject. Game looks great so far, keep up the informative DevLogs!

Oh yeah! I've seen a decent amount of games do the super low res / pixelated 3D effect with it recently. Its a really cool effect. I have actually seen screenshots from "Hide" before. My favorite use of the effect so far is on "Diary of a Space Janitor" which they seem to have changed it to an option rather than the default rendering style of the game.

Thank you! I am really glad that people are taking an interest in my more detailed dev log entries so that I am not wasting time and effort writing them.

-Spencer

[Spennerino]

Mini Update: Tree

I have left this blog dormant for far too long and the game is definitely still progressing although at a slower pace.
Life things have delayed my updates and progress for a bit, but hopefully ill ramp up again soon.

Been doing a lot of art practice recently so here is a tree.

Check out my Twitter for more up to date posts. I tend to only post finished elements to this blog and leave the WIP things for twitter.

-Spencer

[andyfromiowa]

The pixel art is beyond charming.  Great art style!    on that bat animation.  The extra frame definitely sells it.  Keep up the good work!

[Spennerino]

The pixel art is beyond charming.  Great art style!    on that bat animation.  The extra frame definitely sells it.  Keep up the good work!

Thank you so much for the kind words! I am continually looking to improve my art so once I feel a little more confident I will start on some backgrounds and tile-sets for the game. I hope you will come back and follow the games development 

-Spencer

[SolarLune]

Hey, this looks cool. Nice graphics and an interesting game concept. So will it be like Kirby where getting hit loses your power, or do you keep it until later? Does it really matter which job you choose in terms of traversing the level (i.e. some jobs can jump higher than others, which is necessary for completing the game)?

[wizered67]

Looks great and I'm loving the pixel art! Following!