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[Rat Casket]

I HELPED.

[MECH6]

Your animation work is great, man. 

[siskavard]

I HELPED.

Your animation work is great, man. 

Thanks! Frogsord is really looking great.

[friken]

Great character concept. The first post gif of him running into the wall -- couldn't resist laughing 

[siskavard]

Great character concept. The first post gif of him running into the wall -- couldn't resist laughing 

thats always nice to hear! That seems to be everyone's favorite anim so far. I have to make sure everything else is at least as funny as that one.

[JLJac]

On the picking up object stuff, there was a guy a few pages back that suggested that you should be able to see the objects float around inside his head. I think that's a really awesome idea, and wouldn't take too much animating. You'd just have to animate the object slowly rotating around its own axis (and then you could also slowly rotate the sprite, so it looks like a 3D rotation. The sprite rotation could be hooked up to character movement with code, so it'd look like the object reacted the acceleration and inertia). Living creatures could have puffed cheeks like they're holding their breath in there.

You could make the head and the actual face different sprites, and put the sprites like this (from behind forward):
1 - the player sprite, with body and head, but without face.
2 - the swallowed object, on top of the head, with 50% (or whatever works) opacity.
3 - the facial features. This sprite is of course perfectly synced with the player sprite.

That way it would look like the object was floating around inside his head, behind his face.

Then you could give the object in the head a little bit of inertia, so if you run one direction and suddenly turn the object in there takes a little time to follow, a little jelly-like. I could help you with how that stuff is done code-wise.

[barley]

I did try that when I was playing around with stuff and it didn't look too good. It was just a quick attempt though, and I bet if Corey had a go at mocking it up so that it looked nice I could make it work.

The way I do it (and the way we're doing the rain-fill graphic) is with this shader: https://gist.github.com/craigmjohnston/7179065 - which is just a tiny modification to the alpha mask shader on the unity wiki, and with a script that animates the mask texture by switching it depending on the actual sprite animation that's playing (and which frame it's on). It works pretty well, but I kinda want to do some profiling on lower spec hardware (like a phone) to see if I maybe need to stick all the masks into an atlas and just move the texture coordinates instead of having like 50 different textures being switched in and out.

It's not too difficult to build on that and add multiple textures which look as if they're behind the face but in front of the rest of his head.

Quick question, I'm not sure what you mean about 3D rotation and having the object rotate on one axis and the sprite rotate on another? The Z axis is the only one really worth rotating on, since everything is completely flat.

Thanks for the tips though; your solution's one that I thought about at first, but the problem is at the edges of the head. If the held object is in front of the head and then hits one of the edges, it's going to pass outside. That's why I ended up having to use a mask!

[JLJac]

Yeah, having all the masks on the same sheet might be a good idea, even though I have no idea about how the software you use works. It's unity right? If it is faster it might be a good idea to use sprite sheets for everything, rather than individual images. I tend to think it's more orderly that way.

Masks is obviously the best solution for the filling up water animation, but is it for objects inside the head? If for example the tail of a bomb cat sticks out, then it'll be cropped to the silhouette of cloudface and dissapear, right?

Another solution to perhaps consider could be this:

Srite 1 - cloudface sans face, 100% opacity
Sprite 2 - object held, 100% opactiy
Sprite 3 -cloudface sans face, 50% opacity
Sprite 4 - coudface's face, and the outline of the cloud, 100% opacity

That way the object held would look like it's inside the cloud, and if some piece of it was to stick out it would be visible in 100% opacity as supposed to.

Not at all sure this would look better, but it might be worthy of consideration.

With the rotation I meant that to get the genuine "floating in space" look you'd want a little rotation around each of the three axes. But that would be like 8*8*8 frames to animate for each object, if you only had 8 degrees of rotation. So that's not an option. What you could do, is animate rotation around the Y or X axis manually, and then animate rotation around the Z axis with code. Then you have 2 degrees of rotation out of 3 possible, which is pretty good

[barley]

Yeah, everything is already in atlases by virtue of using 2D Toolkit. And yep, it's Unity!

You make a good point about bits sticking out getting clipped off, that would look pretty weird. I think if we go with this we'll have to try a bunch of stuff out; your solution sounds like it could work quite well though!

For the rotation, that would still be a lot of animation - and it's for every object that can be picked up. I'm not sure we'd really need any rotation in X and Y, since nothing else in the game (so far) has any sort of 3D effect to it. Thanks for your thoughts on it, though, if we ever do end up doing something like that they'll be a help!

[siskavard]

I do like that idea though, it's so weird.

[JLJac]

I know right :D

You'll have to try stuff out I guess Iteration always trumps planning.

If you rotate the object around the z axis only with code, I'm sorry to say, I think it'll look cheap. People playing games have a trained eye, we can see when there's "money on the screen", which is why (hopelessly) anything with a lot of animation work will almost always look better than trying to hack it together with code.

But yeah, animating a rotation cycle for each object might be a lot of work. On the upside, it will provide the player with a very vivid image of the shape of the object.

One solution that might be more stylistically consistent might be to not rotate it at all. Nothing else is rotated in the game, right, and the player sprite just goes through a hard flip when you turn. So maybe that would be the cheapest and most consistent solution, though a bit boring.

[barley]

I agree, just rotating it around Z might look bad. I dunno though, I'm thinking that as well as lowering opacity it'd make sense to blur the object inside the head (since it's inside a cloud), so Z-axis rotation might look alright when you can't make out the details.

Stuff to think about anyway!

[GentlestOfGentlemen]

Your gaem is good but I have no motivation but I tried at least

[siskavard]

Your gaem is good but I have no motivation but I tried at least

OMG larger version please!

[GentlestOfGentlemen]

but its all so WIP why

[siskavard]

YEEESSSSSSS

 

[Slader16]

Dem pixels!  

[absenter]

 

[eigenbom]

That makes no sense!

[happymonster]

Perfectly normal to me..