Darkness Encoded (Progress DevLog 3)

Progress DevLog 3

Animations

This week I mostly wanted my player to become more than a square I know right, doesn’t a square fit the theme? I wanted to use sprite-based animations as I didn’t want to do pixel art as it doesn’t fit.

Dominic’s Art

I enlisted Dominic a talented friend of mine and asked if he could draw me some designs of a bird thing. Went back and forth with a few designs until we were both happy. I would have drawn the assets myself but in correlation to my art style, I can draw scenes and landscapes not players. This was great and I had the sprites I just must make it work in unity. I had a basic idea of animating in unity, but this pushed my understanding. It was a great feeling running the game and seeing the Raven player in the game. Although it wasn’t animated just yet I liked the way it worked with the background and looked great with the different speeds of the parallax effect.

Blend Trees & Animation Scripts

When making the animations I luckily only really had 3 states to change between, I used my ‘Squishy Movement’ script to apply the animations at the button press to move up and down. I had a lot of troubleshooting issues with this step as I had to modify and rethink my movement script to allow for the changing states and idle state, which is the horizontal animation. Working on the animations made me frustrated, I was able to see all the animations working at one point or another but, working as intended is another variable. I spent way too much time on this and in hindsight, I probably should have moved on and come back to it. Time management isn’t always my greatest skill, but I dabbled in blend trees which helped narrow down the animation states from a mess to something manageable.

Ascending | Descending | Horizontal

These three are the main animations of the game. Dominic drew them well and I am pleased with how the 4 animation states turned out but when I finally got the animator to work, I was disappointed with the transitions between them. So going down a rabbit hole and sinking a concerning amount of time I tried to make a transition between them. This was not the best idea as it either broke the animations or I wouldn’t be able to link the states easily back to the horizontal state. Ultimately, I decided that it wasn’t worth the time and that even though it bugged me I had to leave it how it was.

Rocket | Future Upgrade Plans

the rocket script was one of the upgrades I plan to do, for now, I am only going to add that one as I know how to make the animations work. The problem with this animation using scripting I must enable and disable it depending if the player has bought the upgrade. I will mainly focus on this later, but the principle is still there and planning the integration is important. I want to have the rocket attached to the player as a child to the player game object and then I can turn it on and off with code. That is a later problem so for now the animation is pretty much done.

Thoughts

This week was like last week as it was kind of all over the place, I want to get better at prioritising certain components as it is easy to get frustrated and bogged down on the small details. I think I spent too much time on it this week, but I am very happy with the way it looks and the integration with everything else so far.