Hey guys,
I've tried twice so far to make this application by paying a programmer to meet my design specs, but each time the programmer has vanished and left me deeper in the hole. I figured maybe I'd just offer the project to anyone who actually has an interest in something like this before I go deeper in debt. So what is the tool?
Overview:The tool is based on proprietary tools I've used at various 2d game-dev companies including gameloft and glu mobile. These tools have proven to be completely invaluable to the work flow and development processes at such companies; essentially cutting our dev-time into a fraction while increasing our ability to make more ambitious titles. The idea is to bring this tool - a better, more user-friendly version - to the independent developer crowd as no such tool exists yet.
Basic Features:module animation
The core function of the tool is to create "modular" animated sprites/entities from a collection of source images. Module animation is the process of creating an animation comprised of multiple source images, or pieces, to be manipulated frame-by-frame. For example, lets say you wanted to draw a guy riding a bicycle. Instead of drawing the bicycle in each frame of the animation sequence - essentially replicating the same bitmap data for each frame - you could draw it once in one image and draw the guy in another. You then combine these images in an animation sequencer.
Sprite mapping
once your sprite is separated into pieces, this presents a whole world of features to be built on top of it. One such as sprite mapping - where you can replace specific images with others on the fly. Lets say you animated one bad guy's running animation, but now you want another bad guy that's mostly the same, but has an entirely different head. Oh no! do you have to remake the entire animation again with new images? Nope! You can define a "sprite map" for that particular sprite where all head images in those animations are replaced with another set. The game engine would then be able to load those different sprite-mapped characters from the very same set of data. very cool.
other features would include...
Bone animation
palette swapping
define origin draw-point
tweened motions
embedded animations
variable definitions per sprite
collision bounds
and much much more
Benefits of Module Animation:optimized data required to load - smaller file sizes
optimized data to store in RAM allowing for faster games
allows the creative types to work independent of the engineer types
faster development work flow
This only scratches the surface of the possibilities and features of this kind of tool, so if you are interested in this idea I'd love to talk with you in more detail about the project. I would request that whoever codes it, makes it with the Qt library. So far, it is the most elegant UI solution I've been able to find for this type of project. I'd be open to hear of other solutions, but I might be hard to convince. Let me know what you think of the idea in general. I have a hard time explaining such a tool or why it'd even be beneficial.
Mockup
Case Examples:Multiple weapons:
Lets say you animate your main character to hold, run with, and shoot a weapon in your game. But your game has many weapons your character can use! Must you create new animations for each gun? Maybe you should get your programmer to place the gun dynamically in-game so it could be switched? Normally one of these two questions must be true, but not with this tool! You could simply create a "sprite map" definition for each weapon type you have in-game which would replace that weapon graphic with another when called upon. All you would need to do is make a number of weapon graphics at all the angles/orientations that your animations require. A HECK of a lot easier than the other two routes!
Movie Sequences:
So you have a bunch of sprites for your game including the main character, baddies, and environment. Lets say you want to have a movie sequence where your character finally meets up with his nemesis to exchange a few words. Normally such a scene would need to be orchestrated carefully by your programmer - leaving little room for creative control from the artist. But with "embedded" animations, you could pull all of your existing character animations into a new one to essentially creating an animated scene comprised of all your sprites that your coder could simply just 'play'.
Menu screens:
Its details like fluid moving menu screens that can really set the tone for a well-polished game, but often is pushed to the wayside due to how much overhead it would require that could have easily been spent on actual game-play polish. With a tool like this, one could make these polished menu systems with ease, and more importantly without engineering support! Make a bunch of buttons, some backgrounds, compose them all together, define collision areas over the button areas, and finally animate the transitions/effects/etc to your hearts content. All your coder would need to be concerned with is what animation to play when the user clicks on a collision area.
I'll continue to post more case examples as I think of them. Let me know if you have any questions
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