So apparently slow weeks with only moderate productivity are just kind of where I’m at right now. I’m comfortable blaming that on Summer, at least partially. At this point I’ve started settling with just getting a few frames of animation done a day – which wouldn’t be so bad except these are just frames of prototype animation, so each one only really counts as half a frame since I’ll have to redraw them all anyway.
Still, progress is progress. This comes with the territory of not really being able to work on a game full-time, even if the reasons for that are as much motivational as purely pragmatic. Sometimes I’ll find it easy to put in 4 hours of focused work each day, sometimes I’ll struggle to put in 30 minutes.
The main thing I did this week is prototyped the running turn animation. This one is a bit complex, so I don’t mind taking a while on it, and I like the overall motion of it though some of the specifics seem a bit jerky and weird still. This actually exemplifies an interesting issue though:
The current movement code for the entity has it generally either moving at full speed or standing completely still. Unlike the player character, there’s no acceleration or deceleration at play, it just snaps into action moving at full speed. However, the running turn animation above probably won’t make any sense under that model, since it will slide weirdly to the left while still picking itself up from the turn. This is a pretty good case study of how code and animation which each work perfectly well in isolation don’t work well together. I realized this would be a problem a while ago, and I figure it’s worth reworking the movement code a bit to get a more naturalistic in-game motion: I would have preferred to do so anyway, but this just gives me another incentive to do so.
This week I’ll probably be working on getting all these animations implemented, updating the movement code in the above-mentioned way, and maybe making left-facing versions of all of the existing right-facing animations. The above animation has some left-facing run frames, but they’re pretty rough since I just rearranged the layers so, for example, the arms are scaled incorrectly since they have some perspective depth. Making proper left frames isn’t too hard, but will unfortunately take a bit longer than just flipping the sprite and rearranging its layers.