KzzzZZZzzt! Dev Update #1 - Animations are Ani-mazing!

In the earlier days of this game's production, I didn't think animation would be something I would give two flying chicken nuggets about. Pretty much most movement by the game objects were stiff and linear. Until I started experimenting a bit and trying some different things with it and I started to see just how much potential it has to improve the game experience.

"Why is this important?" you might ask "I play video game's for the gameplay, not for pretty looking animations!!". That's a valid attitude to have but I believe that good animations play an important role not only on video games but on other forms of media as well such as CGI effects on movies and also cartoon animations, of course. Animations that look robotic or laggy can reduce the suspension of disbelief on any piece of entertainment by reminding the audience that what they're watching is an artificial work and not a look into a different reality.

For example, instead of a vertical wall barrier (seen at left of this paragraph) opening up and closing in a linear way, I changed it to slowly decrease in speed as it rose up. When it is closing, I made it seem like gravity is making it increase in speed as it fell and it would bounce when it hit the bottom before stopping. This makes it a little more fluid, thereby making it's game world a bit closer to its own reality.

(It's hard to see the animation properly because the gif framerate is so low, sorry about that.)

I made another gif to feature the animations better. In the one below. You can see how collected jewels are smoothly animated to move towards the top left HUD section. This makes for a really fluid and less robotic animation, almost magical you might say. Originally, the jewels would just move towards their target at constant speed.

You can also see how landing on a floating platform makes it realistically wobble up and down as if it really is trying to adjust to a new load. Originally, those platforms would remain static when landed on making it look stiff and unreal.

Notice how the platform at the end reacts to the player landing on it

In case you're curious, I was able to add these animations to these objects with the help of a free Unity scripting helper I stumbled upon called iTween. iTween is an easy-to-use animation system that has a lot of interesting features and parameters that can be entered to manipulate object movements to achieve results that would be extremely time-consuming to manually code on your own. It does take a bit of research and practice to learn how to use it though. You can check out the iTween website here. Again, it's free!

In this post, I only talked about movement animations and not sprite animations. Those are two completely different things. So far, I've made some pretty decent sprite animations, enough to give some game objects life, but nothing too impressive.

Before I end this post, I would like to show a couple more gif's I made showing some more early game footage. Enjoy!

A normal day of a character in a platformer

Those pipes look like fun

Additional notes:

• I've already begun adding sound effects to some of the game's events but I still plan to add some more before showing them on this blog for a more complete presentation. I could possibly show the first video teaser next week.



• So far, I would say 6 levels out of the planned 20 levels have complete level design. I would consider this good progress. Many assets required for these levels are already created so finishing the rest of the levels is going to take less and less time with the more game assets I make.
  
• The backgrounds are still too simplistic, I plan to work on them some more but I'm still going to focus on other aspects of the game first so this is something I won't be talking about until I become interested on decorating the backgrounds a bit more.
  
• Expect more updates within the week. :)