The animations in this video have so much weight to them and at the same time feel so snappy, great work!
Funny you should mention that, because the first topic for a little progress report from the Land of Code is
Why GameMaker's Animation System Isn't Designed For Artists
It should be pointed out that's probably not intended for dedicated artists. Still, it's not good enough for Irkalla.
It's undeniable that Irkalla has some very sexy art, and you're right, the animations have weight and detail in spades. You can feel the servos moving. The aesthetic and the way it's being expressed is what attracted me to this project in the first place. The programming mentality here is necessarily a supportive one - I need to build tools and features that lets Skydsgaard do his thing.
After building an MVP, it became very clear that the foremost priority was facilitating animations to bring each and every asset to life. I'm using GameMaker for its extraordinary production tempo - you can build games extremely fast. I'm a great believer in fail-early-fail-often and having the tools already in place to build half a game gets you closer to that high frequency iteration sweetspot. This comes at a price, however.
Whilst I built a working platformer with the requisite features in a couple of days, the default animation system simply wasn't supporting the fantastic work that Skydsgaard has been producing. Animations were linear, almost static, and lacked temporal variation and detail. We're using Photoshop to put together the artwork and it allows for individual frame timings. Bringing that design environment closer to the game, allowing for subtle tweaks at any point in development without interrupting the flow, is absolutely essential.
GameMaker games tend to skew towards timing locked into the framerate due to its architecture; the
image_speed internal variable controls how long it takes for an animation to play by incrementing a counter every frame. Irkalla will run at 60FPS, naturally, but I'm wary of locking any timing to the framerate. It bit Hyper Light Drifter in the ass and it bit Nuclear Throne in the ass... as my mother told me, "Don't double up on other people's mistakes."
The animation system needed to accomplish three things:
- Allow for easy adjustment using human-readable configuration in an external file
- Be framerate independent
- Allow for custom timings per frame, and be able to attach other meta data to each frame
The solution was, all together now,
Javascript Object Notation and
Per-Second Timing.
Yeah, it's a bit clumsy and requires more hand-inputting of numbers that I'd like, but GM supports JSON natively and it gives us the design space to implement absolutely anything per-frame in the future. Indeed, we've already used the metadata feature to attach the player's primary weapon to the character for pinpoint animation flexibility, even with swappable assets.
Here's a sample of the JSON (values liable to be changed at any time, by design!):
{
"spr_mc_l_hit": {
"gun y": {
"1": 21,
"2": 21,
"3": 21,
"4": 21
},
"gun x": {
"1": 13,
"2": 13,
"3": 13,
"4": 13
},
"delay": {
"1": 0.2,
"2": 0.2,
"3": 0.1,
"4": 0.1
}
}
}With thanks to
YAL for his
JSON Minifier that allowed me to build and format these without too much dicking around. You'll notice that the delay times - technically they're dwell times for each frame - are decimals. These are in the same units (seconds) as Photoshop so transferring data from one to the other is as simple - and error-averse - as possible.
GameMaker very conveniently has the internal
current_time read-only system variable that allows me to read a millisecond-accurate time. You can also store the start time of each frame and use a roll-over error value as well, but I've found the start time method to be faster to program and faster to debug. Actually achieving this system in GameMaker requires some messing around with the internal system for traversing JSON (for those who use GM, learn your data structures!) and is probably a bit too specific to be exciting for the UE4/Unity devs among you.
Trying to bring the game engine closer to the design tools that people use (external or internal) is always worth it. Spending time on good workflow early on yields massive benefits when things get tense close to deadlines!
Sister post on Reddit
