Sometimes going back to traditional animation gives better and juicy results

Finally, last weekend I found myself with lot of things to animate, now that the framework is almost ready and mostly working except for the audio module that is only half implemented. I decided to re-take again the juicy part, which is to make the eye candy and character movement so I can test if the framework works as expected.

A week ago, when talking about juicy things that make your game looks better I found Juice it or lose it video, and how to make simple things look better by adding small animations, or small things that give more feedback to the player and make the game experience a experience of the 21st century based on 20th century technology. So I decided to animate the Cat's character tail that was a static 2d sprite with springs simulation to wave it but it didn't look nice enough for me, so I tried different 3d and 2d techniques without much success, I couldn't make it look good enough given the time I wanted to spend on it, so doing it in 3d requires a lot of work modeling and animating all the vertices the way I wanted, and 2d polygons do not deform very well with a shape like a tail, so after a few tries I decided to go back to the traditional frame by frame animation, and make about a dozen frames like the picture below.

You can check the progress in this video from a very rought sketch to a clean final animation.

I am still wondering if I can make a 2d patch deformed polygon that can show 2d textures with appropiate deformation and corrected perspective in 2d, but so far I haven't been able to find a good way to do it without having to invest a lot of time and effort, given that, 2d traditional animation seems to be the right path in this case.

Happy holidays and prosperous new year!

Wish you happy holidays and Prosperous new year, it has been a very busy year with lots of new ideas to test and a lot more work than I was expecting, but finally it is given good results.

I just uploaded a simple video showing up spring vertex functionality and how secondary motion can be achieved easily and it also interacts with cloth fabric vertices at the same time. Most probably the framwork will be ready for prime time by the end of January, and expecting to develop all the juicy stuff for the game after, it was very tedious to animate and adjust parameters while programming but the new framework will make that a thing of the past.

Time to get warmer this winter...isn't it?

It was a very busy week, with many small ideas that finally paid off,  it was a long journey since I started working on the fabric simulator but finally I was able to make it work perfectly, next is  wind and gravity modifiers but hope this will take very little time to implement. Check the latest video showing the fabric simulator in real time at my channel. Don't forget to like it! if you want to get more updates on the next things I have in mind. Almost one video a week this December, a lot of things are getting done every week.

So few lines of code were needed this week to solve the worse physics issues I couldn't fix until something come up to my mind while traveling in the train. The only sad thing is that I won't be able to release Elem3ntz! game before year-end as I was hoping for, but instead I added so many new things into the animation framework but I think it will pay offs in the long term.

Finally enabled texture atlas animation

After so many months, finally I made time to add texture atlas animation clips in the framework, took a few days to complete the user interface and cloning options but now I can easily add texture atlas sprite animation. Check the latest update in my channel

Animation clips references

I am quite happy today, and very busy, the last few days I've been trying to figure out how to include clips from other animations that I have made to re-use them as building blocks with minor overhead. Finally I can show some of the latest changes in the framework. This weekend I was able to solve this problem, I couldn't figure out an easy way for many months until this weekend and finally an Eureka! moment came, and found a way to run multiple animation clips inside other clips as references, making a lot easier to animate, each included clip can run in infinite loops at different rates or triggered by in-game events. This seems to be a trivial issue if you program the solution for each specific animation but when running multiple ones and trying to batch everything in one mesh it becomes quite complicated to build.

Check the video in my channel

There is still one issue related to cloths and springs, whenever the frameworks runs slowly or is delayed the vertex location can go nuts and jump all the way around, it doesn't happens as long as the game runs smoothly, so I need to implement some special logic to avoid over moving those vertices, not an easy task, but have many more things that I want to finish implementing before releasing the Elem3ntz! game.

What a month for an indie developer...

Had to send my monitor for repair and will take 2 to 3 weeks to get it back, so using a backup monitor for now but it is so small that all my tools do not fit into this screen, anyway not much to complain, but have to be away from the development cycle for a week due to some personal issues so I will have the time to upload the preview movie of the framework after I come back. Crossing fingers to be fine in the next couple of weeks and get back to release the game I've been working on for the past year

Time goes so fast since my last update!

Wow, I just noticed that it was almost a month since my last update, and a lot progress has been made. Inverse Kinematic is a lot harder to implement in a systematic way, testing and hardcoding bone indexes was quite easy to do and worked fine, but this same method didn't work if I wanted to expand it to the full skeleton, and worse, I had to rewrite the code quite many times to make it usable, just today rewrote the patch rendering logic due to a wrong assumption on how IK will modify the rotation angles, anyway I am quite happy with the results I am having now.

Now most of the basic animation tools are almost ready, and thinking how to implement an easier way to manage so many parameters and made the less number of mistakes, I have been searching for many ways to organize data and how it will be linked but so far I haven't found yet a convincing way to do it. I have many new ideas for my next game, and all the work I've been doing for this game will serve well for the next, even if the next one will be very different than Elem3ntz!. , I promise that I will publish a quick video of the editor by next week.