Saturday, February 9, 2019

Run animation, clothing layers.

More or less settled in to the new place.

I Had a week or so where I had to stop working. The same day I took some pills prescribed by a docter for something else, I had what felt like weird circulation problems. Turns out it was a muscle problem due to the hard floors in the new place, of all things.

So with that, I'm back to work again.

As far as the on-going game is concerned, I've mostly been working on some of the stuff that will be shared with other games. That includes the dialogue system, the animation/sound editor, and a couple other things.

I've also been messing with the run animation here and there, since it's one of the most important things to get right before doing clothing. Trying to decide how I want the head movement to be.

I'm also still trying to decide how I want to handle clothing layering. My initial plan was that clothing would come in the form of entire outfits, as opposed to individual pieces. This means that an alternate outfit sprite would include the body itself, as opposed to layering individual clothing sprites over a nude body.

One of the advantages to this would be that the clothing would not need to "fit" the body, and the body could be modified to fit the clothing. For example, if the character wears a dress, the stride of the running animation could be modified to be be a bit more dainty, or allow for whatever the clothing is, like this.


In either case, you're risking rework later on. If clothing changes the body, then if you want to change the face, you need to change it in every outfit. However, if you want to change something about the body, you risk it not fitting existing outfits.

If clothing includes the body, you could also have the style of animations be entirely different. For example if you have a more "seductive" outfit, then a crouch animation could be a lewd kneel as opposed to a "combat ready" stance of knight armor. Whereas if clothing is a separate layer, then modding is also more doable, since you could modify the player sprite and still have all the clothing fit. The middle-ground would be that there are base sprites for different things (seductive, combat, normal, etc), however this would still lock you down to specific templates, and mixing certain kinds of clothing would be more work unless they are also locked by type.

Not sure yet. I'll probably do the base sprites, and then I'll probably decide once I've tested out an outfit or two.

19 comments:

  1. I like the Idea of clothing changing animations.

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  2. If I were to vote on which head animation looks best, I would probably say the one in the first picture.

    I feel like layered clothing would be better for the long-term however I'm a bit afraid It will probably increase the workload you got...

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    1. Layered would be more work, but not by much. Would mostly come down to the overhead of file handling each one, as opposed to drawing it.

      Technically I could also add clothing easier layered, since I could add single pieces of clothing at a time as opposed to the whole outfit.

      I'll probably program it as whole outfits, but animate it as parts, in the beginning. That way I can decide based on how much time it takes, or if any issues arise.

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  3. I know it sounds weird but I actually prefer the run animation where the head is more steady? More animation is often seen as better animation but a healthy person runs with a steady posture and only sways their head about if they're out of breath of unfit. If it really wasn't a lot of work and you wanted to put in a stamina meter for the game THEN maybe you'd use both animations to display that.

    That aside, I like the idea of outfit types changing the run animation since it can also be seen as another choice in personalisation and customisation. It changes how the player perceives the character they're playing as, so someone who wants to look "cool" might opt for armour exactly for that reason or someone who wants the character to be seen as a dainty girl or something would opt for the dress. Of course that should definitely just be types like you said rather than a unique animation for every single outfit but that probably goes without saying.

    With that in mind, I love this character's expression (it makes me think she has a lot of sass) but I know some people like their H protags to display a sense of shame. Would you make her animations when nude completely different or would you say this is more like her not to care so much about that stuff whilst adventuring?

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    1. I'll probably use the steady one, if only because it keeps things simple.

      She will have a lot more varied expressions during other animations. There could be alternate nude animations based on shame since I'd only have to do variations once, without them being affected by most clothing.

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  4. Run cycle looking really nice, the first one looks neat but the second ones are probably the better choices to decide between.

    As for the clothing ideas, with the game I work on, we've got base body, and each piece of clothing as it's own layer, so it is a clothing fits to body type situation, though sometimes I give the shirt a little more, I guess room? after the breasts so it's not full-on adhering to them like body paint or something, lol. The idea of clothing altering animations is pretty neat tho, could be fun to do and see.

    One neat thing that the layer setup with my work is that it can allow for pretty much a modular outfit (actually one of the goals on our patreon :v) where I could have say, jacket/shirt/boots on, but shorts/undies off, and she's running around bottomless. Any chance of something similar being possible in your game? I love me some bottomless outfits : P

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    1. Layered clothing = seperate sections of clothing (head,body,legs,feet,hands, etc)

      While there would still be some advantages to doing entire outfits but layering them over a base body, if I did layered I would generally only do it in order to have parts of clothing that could be mixed and matched.

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  5. I like the idea of different outfits having the different stances, running animations and crouches. In my personal opinion I feel that just those little things would give a vastly different gameplay vibe and would add to the replay value immensely.

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  6. Have you ever thought of another running cycle for low HP or would that be too much work?

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    1. Basically anything that requires a sprite for clothing is time consuming. So if low HP = nude, then it wouldn't be much work, whereas if it's reflected in all clothing then it would be a lot of work.

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  7. Perhaps there could be types of strong monsters that only attack you if you're wearing a specific outfit. So if you give advantages to certain costumes it could run a risk reward system of having to deal with difficult enemies that would otherwise not be interested in you.

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    1. Yeah, that's a possibility. There are also status effects I will be adding that will affect how enemies react.

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  8. Still love you, Kyrieru
    Keep up the good work

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  9. For the game, how do you think you'll eventually handle civilization/cities? I've been playing a lot of Etrian odyssey and kind of dig the simple menu navigation type cities, but I'm not sure if that would work in a platformer

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    1. Well, technically I wont be locked to any one way, and towns could have entirely separate mechanics, if I wanted to.

      In general though, towns will probably just be one area with all the buildings. Indoors will be a different place, after going into a door, probably.

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  10. I think this is a dumb question, since the sprites are right above but, did number 8 win?

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    1. Wait, wrong post...

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    2. It's a combination, but mainly it determined that shorter hair was the way to go.

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  11. Actually liking the first run cycle anim. The head movement feels very Megaman 8-esque.

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