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[Five]

Hoe can Gamemaker do all that without stuttering?
Big backgrounds and sprite, plus double drawing.

I think you're underestimating GameMaker. I have dozens of huge sprites and thousands of smaller ones drawing all the time, all at a silky smooth 1080p60.

Can anyone with some Spine 2d experience (this might include you two at team Nethermind) explain to me the features list here, or at least, what are the most important features you're looking at?

https://esotericsoftware.com/spine-purchase

I think free form deformation is an important one, but I'm trying to internalize what some of these others are. The Stencyl guy asked me what would be most important to try and bring in support for since we're discussing Spine integration, and I have no practical experience with the program yet.

http://esotericsoftware.com/spine-in-depth

Ghosting is something I don't use. It's a previz of the next and/or previous frame in the animator, not part of in-game rendering. Instead, I just toggle between adjacent frames with hotkeys (WASD is used to control next/prev keyframe and playback, which is super comfortable).

Meshes in this context reduce overdraw by making a simple poly mesh over the shape of your sprite rather than using the whole rectangle.

I design most models to not need free form deformation, but it's handy for things that need to stretch and bend in a non-uniform way.

Inverse Kinematics isn't supported in GameMaker, which sucks to be frank, but the idea there is aiming a pair of connected bones at another point and letting the computer figure out what the proper angles should be. This is usually used to make feet locked to the terrain and have head/eye-tracking work, but it can be used in animation based contexts as well.

Take this unicycle mime that I have. Ideally, the legs should be locked to the feet, which are locked to the pedals, which is locked to the shaft, which is locked to the seat, which is locked to the legs. It's a loop, which the computer wouldn't be able to work out, so I have to split it up some how. With IK, I'll make the legs and shaft children of the seat, and then the wheel and feet children of the shaft, and the legs aimed at the feet. What I'd like to do is animate the wheel and have the legs automatically stretch to where they'd need to be for any given angle.

It's not doing that because the IK doesn't work in GameMaker. So that means that I have to tediously hand position the legs on each key frame, and make enough key frames so that the tweened leg motion closely enough matches the tweened wheel motion. You can kind of see in the GIF above how the ankles fall out of socket on a lot of the frames.

It moves fast and is out of focus during gameplay, so that animation is good enough for now, but IK would have made it a lot simpler.

 

[Jobbs]

Thanks Abe That was a really good explanation, especially on IK. The thing you said about feet lining up with the ground is one of those little touches that fills my heart with joy.

 

[Blizzard]

Benefits of owning a company:

• Getting a free pen in the mail from some company trying to sell you pens to promote your own company.

 

[Five]

Thanks Abe That was a really good explanation, especially on IK. The thing you said about feet lining up with the ground is one of those little touches that fills my heart with joy.

Right. You just need to make sure that the animation/model data is exposed to the program. That way you can find the feet bones that the legs are pinned to and move them to where the ground is.

Games have been using IK for a while now. I think even Link in Ocarina of Time has it. It's easier to go without in 2D, but it's still a useful tool in certain contexts.

 

[AlphaProspector]

Don't forget, folks, if you slap a follow on @DevGAF and it doesn't follow you back - PM me here. I do my best to double check against our Twitter list but not everyone is on it.

How can one be added to said Twitter list? I was about to go to sleep when I read this, haha.

This is my Twitter though: https://twitter.com/AlphaProspector

Ah, yesterday I got some more finished sprites. I'm still waiting for the BG artist to give signs of life but I think I went overboard with the requests on mood and style... I'm glad I provided enough photographic references but, still, the wait for finished art is painful. PAINFUL

I had to force myself to learn the art of patience and the mantra 「仕方がない」

 

[Jobbs]

Right. You just need to make sure that the animation/model data is exposed to the program. That way you can find the feet bones that the legs are pinned to and move them to where the ground is.

Games have been using IK for a while now. I think even Link in Ocarina of Time has it. It's easier to go without in 2D, but it's still a useful tool in certain contexts.

Weights

Weights (often called "skinning") allow individual vertices in a mesh to be attached to different bones. When the bones move, the vertices move with them and the mesh is deformed automatically. Posing a character with images that can bend becomes as easy as just positioning the bones.

This sounds awsome too. Think I'm going to try and spend a little time with Spine in the near future.

 

[electroflame]

Benefits of owning a company:

• Getting a free pen in the mail from some company trying to sell you pens to promote your own company.

If you can repeat this enough, you could easily pay for dev expenses by reselling pens in bulk on the black market.

Spoiler

Note: may require the selling on one's kidney as well.

 

[ken_matthews]

Games have been using IK for a while now. I think even Link in Ocarina of Time has it. It's easier to go without in 2D, but it's still a useful tool in certain contexts.

I think IK is more than just "a useful tool in certain contexts." These days, its almost a requirement for any character animation.

Admittedly, I have never done 2D animation, but I figure the utility of IK in 3D applications should still apply to any 2D animation solution that incorporates bones+IK.

For instance if you wanted to animate the leg of a character without IK, you would need to rotate the hip bone, then the knee bone:

With a proper IK setup, you can just move a single IK handle to move an entire limb while also maintaining proper joint constraints (ie, the knee will only hing backwards and not buckle forward)

Using IK just makes animation so much easier

 

[Five]

I think IK is more than just "a useful tool in certain contexts." These days, its almost a requirement for any character animation.

Admittedly, I have never done 2D animation, but I figure the utility of IK in 3D applications should still apply to any 2D animation solution that incorporates bones+IK.

For instance if you wanted to animate the leg of a character without IK, you would need to rotate the hip bone, then the knee bone:

With a proper IK setup, you can just move a single IK handle to move an entire limb while also maintaining proper joint constraints (ie, the knee will only hing backwards and not buckle forward)

Using IK just makes animation so much easier

In the context of Spine, IK only refers to the dynamic, runtime calculation of angles. There's a separate pose tool that uses IK to help you animate and it's like what you have there, where the angles are going to get baked into the animation file. The pose tool isn't limited to the Pro version of Spine, so it's not relevant to Jobb's question.

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Benefits of owning a company:

• Getting a free pen in the mail from some company trying to sell you pens to promote your own company.

Benefit in my country: instant tax write off for anything small businesses by that costs less than $20,000 for the next two years.

 

[ken_matthews]

In the context of Spine, IK only refers to the dynamic, runtime calculation of angles.

I'll take your word for it

From reading the website, the Spine software (Pro) utilizes standard 3D animation techniques: bones + IK + weighted skin.

I was just attempting to broaden the perspective as IK in character animation is typically used as I illustrated; its common utility goes far beyond locking feet to the ground or head tracking, so I just wanted to add to the explanation of features.

 

[Five]

I'll take your word for it

From reading the website, the Spine software (Pro) utilizes standard 3D animation techniques: bones + IK + weighted skin.

I was just attempting to broaden the perspective as IK in character animation is typically used as I illustrated; its common utility goes far beyond locking feet to the ground or head tracking, so I just wanted to add to the explanation of features.

Yeah, I get what you're doing. Thanks.

Technically the posing I'm doing here is using inverse kinematics, but it's not called that. It's just called the pose tool:

Whereas the constraints locking the feet here are made under the IK branch:

 

[ken_matthews]

UV:

(Made this at 2AM, excuse the random placement, I was mostly worried about stretching)

Don't know if the topology is super-bad, at very least I there aren't any triangles or n-gons, so there's that. lol
There are denser areas because I wanted them to be sharper, so I added support loops for the smoothing.

If you are going to smooth a mesh that has hard angles, I would typically recommend not using the insert edge loops function to maintain the hard angle. Instead, you want to crease the edges; this will keep your topology clean when you apply smoothing.

In the UV layout those straight pieces are the lower part of the mesh, which once relaxed came out completely straight. I cut the mesh in four pieces because I didn't think that having the whole ring as one piece would be good (I was mostly worried about the raised section being distorted), but apparently I was wrong? I'm still trying to get a feel for UV layouts.

I guess it depends on the texture you are going to use. If you are painting them in Photoshop, then maybe separate straight pieces will work better. If you are using an app like substance painter, or using a tileable texture, then unwrapping the UVs from a single seam in the back is probably the better option. You can eliminate/minimize distortion by relaxing and smoothing the UVs after you unwrap.

 

[More_Badass]

Was browsing the GAF game showcase, and SuperHOT, Assault Android Cactus, Apexicon, Dust, Ephemerid, and Volgarr The Viking are missing

 

[ken_matthews]

Yeah, I get what you're doing. Thanks.

Technically the posing I'm doing here is using inverse kinematics, but it's not called that. It's just called the pose tool:

Whereas the constraints locking the feet here are made under the IK branch:

That's actually really cool. Spine is the first I've heard of where 3D animation techniques are used for true 2D animation. Granted, I do not do 2D animation so I wouldn't know either way, but I can imagine that it makes your life so much easier.

 

[Five]

Was browsing the GAF game showcase, and SuperHOT, Assault Android Cactus, Apexicon, Dust, Ephemerid, and Volgarr The Viking are missing

Hey, good call. Come to think of it, I haven't seen either of the Volgarr guys around in a while. I wonder what they're up to.

That's actually really cool. Spine is the first I've heard of where 3D animation techniques are used for true 2D animation. Granted, I do not do 2D animation so I wouldn't know either way, but I can imagine that it makes your life so much easier.

Yeah, it's really quite nice. It blends the best of traditional animation (including local flipbook animations per bone if desired) with all the new 3D tools that make sense for the medium. I've never animated faster before.

 

[Pehesse]

Was browsing the GAF game showcase, and SuperHOT, Assault Android Cactus, Apexicon, Dust, Ephemerid, and Volgarr The Viking are missing

You're right! Those, along with many, many others. We're going as fast as we can with the time we have If you'd like to help, feel free to PM us links and 520x294 screenshots/image compilations for each of these, so we can go faster!

As a side note, there have been plenty of WIP games in this thread for which (understandably) we have no titles. We'd still like to post about those, so if you want to give them even temporary titles, feel free!

 

[Dynamite Shikoku]

Time to get back into fmod studio I think

 

[Niwa]

I'm toying around with possible WW2 games ideas...anyone got anything they'd want most should a new WW2 game come out?

Point & Click Adventure about a Jewish Girl in WW2

 

[Jacksinthe]

How can one be added to said Twitter list? I was about to go to sleep when I read this, haha.

This is my Twitter though: https://twitter.com/AlphaProspector

Ah, yesterday I got some more finished sprites. I'm still waiting for the BG artist to give signs of life but I think I went overboard with the requests on mood and style... I'm glad I provided enough photographic references but, still, the wait for finished art is painful. PAINFUL

I had to force myself to learn the art of patience and the mantra 「仕方がない」

PM me to remind me to add that later today

Was browsing the GAF game showcase, and SuperHOT, Assault Android Cactus, Apexicon, Dust, Ephemerid, and Volgarr The Viking are missing

Then they can PM with all of their details. We aren't (and shouldn't) be doing all the work for everyone. We are putting this together, the very LEAST everyone can do is PM a few small details about their own game. We populated the list with a few just to have something to show when we put it up.

 

[Jacksinthe]

You're right! Those, along with many, many others. We're going as fast as we can with the time we have If you'd like to help, feel free to PM us links and 520x294 screenshots/image compilations for each of these, so we can go faster!

As a side note, there have been plenty of WIP games in this thread for which (understandably) we have no titles. We'd still like to post about those, so if you want to give them even temporary titles, feel free!

Pehesse says what I mean in a much less grumpy way hahahaha!

 

[Ito]

Thanks Abe That was a really good explanation, especially on IK. The thing you said about feet lining up with the ground is one of those little touches that fills my heart with joy.

Then you gonna love these (except for the floating shadow, still have to figure out a way to trim it)

 

[Jumplion]

Does anyone have any idea how to deal with splitscreen cameras, specifically dynamic splitscreen (like you see in the Lego games) for a 2D game? There's a plugin for that in Unity though I'd be open for switching engines if it's easier in, say, Unreal.

Right now the way I'm trying to think of it is to split the screen in two ways vertically, having two cameras of equal size for those sections of the screen. Whenever the edges of those cameras touch, it should disable those two cameras viewports and activate it with a "main" camera. Need to dive into Unity's camera system, figure it out.

 

[Icyflamez96]

The tutorials at the Unity website dove into C# stuff that I didn't understand quick. I thought they'd teach you it like you're a noob at some point, but I guess I'll go elsewhere for that.

 

[dark_inferno]

Does anyone have any idea how to deal with splitscreen cameras, specifically dynamic splitscreen (like you see in the Lego games) for a 2D game? There's a plugin for that in Unity though I'd be open for switching engines if it's easier in, say, Unreal.

Right now the way I'm trying to think of it is to split the screen in two ways vertically, having two cameras of equal size for those sections of the screen. Whenever the edges of those cameras touch, it should disable those two cameras viewports and activate it with a "main" camera. Need to dive into Unity's camera system, figure it out.

Depending on the game i would say do it or dont. If its a lego like game then you have really good tutorials out there you just have to google for it. If you have a game that needs fast reflexes then i would recommend against it because it could be irritating for the player not having a fixxed splitscreen and every little thing that affects your screen could mean game over.

Also its much much easier to have fixxed splitscreen.

The tutorials at the Unity website dove into C# stuff that I don't understand quick. I thought they'd teach you it like you're a noob at some point, but I guess I'll go elsewhere for that.

What are you interested in? Just C#? Programming in general? Or just Unity tutorials?

 

[Icyflamez96]

Unity and C#

 

[so1337]

Then you gonna love these (except for the floating shadow, still have to figure out a way to trim it)

Oh, interesting. I've always wondered how 2D games handle slopes. I thought that most characters in sidescrollers use a simple bounding box for collision, but that would mean that a slope would cause the bounding box to only collide at the outer edge and the sprite would sort of "float" in mid air. Yours not only doesn't do that, it also adjusts the angle of the feet.

 

[SplitYourInfinities]

Wow guys, your work is so inspiring. I'm thinking about quitting my job and try to do my own thing. The problem is that i have zero experience in game development in a professional environment, i made little experiments (euphemism for bad games) during game jams but nothing ambitious or half-serious. I also give up easily every time i try to do something bigger because the project gets out of hand, or because i lose the interest. I'm not starting at level 0 tho, i know how to make quality code (i work as a software engineer) and have some experience with game engines (Unity mostly) and basic knowledge of how a game works.

I'm going to keep an eye in this thread so i stay motivated and focused on my goal.

 

[dark_inferno]

Wow guys, your work is so inspiring. I'm thinking about quitting my job and try to do my own thing. The problem is that i have zero experience in game development in a professional environment, i made little experiments (euphemism for bad games) during game jams but nothing ambitious or half-serious. I also give up easily every time i try to do something bigger because the project gets out of hand, or because i lose the interest. I'm not starting at level 0 tho, i know how to make quality code (i work as a software engineer) and have some experience with game engines (Unity mostly) and basic knowledge of how a game works.

I'm going to keep an eye in this thread so i stay motivated and focused on my goal.

Dont quit your job. You need the money. Without food you cant code. Without a code you have no game. Without a game you get no money. Go do you job and make a game as a hobby. One day you have a great idea where you think "This needs to be made and people WILL love this.". Thats where the fun begins.

 

[SplitYourInfinities]

Dont quit your job. You need the money. Without food you cant code. Without a code you have no game. Without a game you get no money. Go do you job and make a game as a hobby. One day you have a great idea where you think "This needs to be made and people WILL love this.". Thats where the fun begins.

The problem with my job is that it eats up a lot of my time (i work 8 hours/day) and when i get home i'm too tired to keep working on my projects. At the moment i have savings to survive for a while so i was thinking in taking some months off and try to create something.

My other option is to enter the (mobile) game industry and gain some experience.

 

[Jobbs]

Then you gonna love these (except for the floating shadow, still have to figure out a way to trim it)

Is this being done by way of IK or is it just a separate animation all together? I suspect the second one.

Really nice detail though. If I'm going to knitpick, the shadow is floating off the cliff side.

You should consider just going to a blob shadow, so much easier.

 

[Jumplion]

The tutorials at the Unity website dove into C# stuff that I don't understand quick. I thought they'd teach you it like you're a noob at some point, but I guess I'll go elsewhere for that.

If you're looking on absolute basics on C# itself, this tutorial might be able to help you out with basics on C# (most of his videos are great for crash-course tutorials), it's only about an hour long and it's extremely comprehensive from comments to functions to whatever the hell else there is.

For Unity tutorials incorporating C#, there's a bunch out there. I'd say figure out something small for you to do and look up tutorials to help you at them.

Depending on the game i would say do it or dont. If its a lego like game then you have really good tutorials out there you just have to google for it. If you have a game that needs fast reflexes then i would recommend against it because it could be irritating for the player not having a fixxed splitscreen and every little thing that affects your screen could mean game over.

Also its much much easier to have fixxed splitscreen.

My implementation would probably be dirt simple. Basically, a screen split like this
[ | ] merging into just [ ] when the two players come together in a fixed point. My main point of concern is making sure that you don't see duplicates of the players (player 1 showing up in player 2's camera), the GameMaker prototype I made had that issue. I could probably hard code it and look through tutorials on basic split screening.

 

[UsagiWare]

Then you gonna love these (except for the floating shadow, still have to figure out a way to trim it)

.

I'm assuming that the shadow is a squished player sprite?

Without knowing how you handle your forground layer, I'm guessing that it should not be too hard to clip the shadow to the forground using a shader (i.e. only draw shadow if there is a forground pixel underneath).
I'm not sure if it can be done without shaders in GM:Studio.


Also how do you do the trailing piece of cloth? it seems to be some physics object following the main sprite

 

[shaowebb]

I think IK is more than just "a useful tool in certain contexts." These days, its almost a requirement for any character animation.

Admittedly, I have never done 2D animation, but I figure the utility of IK in 3D applications should still apply to any 2D animation solution that incorporates bones+IK.

For instance if you wanted to animate the leg of a character without IK, you would need to rotate the hip bone, then the knee bone:

With a proper IK setup, you can just move a single IK handle to move an entire limb while also maintaining proper joint constraints (ie, the knee will only hing backwards and not buckle forward)

Using IK just makes animation so much easier

Honestly a proper rig can consist of a setup that utilizes both IK and FK. This way you can do stuff that needs forward kinematics so you don't have to reposition joints to keep them from bending as well as the opposite where you can raise a leg and automatically have the knee bend so they aren't goosestepping.

Its also advisable to setup control sliders and not just rings on certain areas so that you can do stuff like move a slider up and down to curl a finger or all the fingers to make fists and pointing motions without having to stop for each joint to be moved and rotated. Additional slider controls are advisable for setting up facial contortions on the eyes, cheeks, brow, nose, mouth, jaw and eyelid. Additionally I prefer to also have a setup for a foot roll motion as well as for breathing so I can just slide my controller to have someones chest and shoulders move and swell on command for regular breathing animations as well as for heavy breathing animations.

Its a lot of extra work if all you want is a static posed object or something thats a one and done animation thats short, but for anything you plan to see a lot like a playable character I HIGHLY recommend taking the extra time for this as it saves a lot of time in the long run and even lends you the potential to come up with extra animations you hadn't originally keyframed before.

Tricky part though if you have a dual kinematic structure of both IK and FK is muscle weighting. Some will need rigid binds and some will need more elastic ones same as everything else but orientation setups between the two rigs should be considered so you can have one limb stiff and the rest moving around with the IK (example is waxing a table. Hand is stiff and flat, arm is moving IK style). Plus often a lot of anchoring is needed and all that for objects meant to move but not stretch along the body as it contorts.

If you do it right though the results really do stand out because everything you animate will be able to have a ton of extra touches added to it at very little effort afterwards. Things like squash/stretch, fluid walking, expressive faces during scenes...it all adds up to hours and hours of work but with a good setup like I described its more like playtime than work for the rest of those scenes as the main work is already done for you and all you have to do is enjoy your controller toy.

I recommend this vid to get an idea of some of this

 

[nitekrawlwer]

Does anyone have any idea how to deal with splitscreen cameras, specifically dynamic splitscreen (like you see in the Lego games) for a 2D game? There's a plugin for that in Unity though I'd be open for switching engines if it's easier in, say, Unreal.

Right now the way I'm trying to think of it is to split the screen in two ways vertically, having two cameras of equal size for those sections of the screen. Whenever the edges of those cameras touch, it should disable those two cameras viewports and activate it with a "main" camera. Need to dive into Unity's camera system, figure it out.

You're looking for the veiwport rect property of the camera. This should explain it.

I have 3 cameras. 1 that is the whole complete screen and camera 2 and 3 are the respective player halves of the screen. Just disable camera's 2 and 3 when the players are sufficiently close and disable camera one and activate cameras 2 and 3 when they players leave that distance.

 

[jimmythepage]

I tried to work a bit on the IK with Spine but I wasn't sure what I was doing, I had a pretty cool tutorial which put also the mesh deformations in the whole process making it look quite cool, but I never actually tried it in game.

It's been a pretty rough time, and sadly I can't draw properly for a (hopefully) small neurological issue, but I can't pass the whole day relaxing so I dusted off a litt epuzzle game design I had in the closet.

Basically it's a topdown turn based archery/puzzle game, if anyone saw something similar please tell me because I passed a long time searching but I didn't find anything similar.

It's based on a ranking system like Angry Birds, the less moves and arrows you use the best, when you use an arrow you can go a grab it again but you'll use a movement, so sometimes you have to weight the best approach to use.

Since as I told before I can't draw properly now, I'm very slowly using pixel art for it.
It could work as a mobile game I guess (hopefully without a F2P system), but I'm thinking to use flash and put it on armor games or similar.

I planned traps, ricochet points that will make your arrows turn, exploding barrels and some other stuff to spice up the gameplay.

 

[Peltz]

The problem with my job is that it eats up a lot of my time (i work 8 hours/day) and when i get home i'm too tired to keep working on my projects. At the moment i have savings to survive for a while so i was thinking in taking some months off and try to create something.

My other option is to enter the (mobile) game industry and gain some experience.

I won't quit my day job until I have something really cool to show for it after working nights/weekends.

 

[Ito]

Oh, interesting. I've always wondered how 2D games handle slopes. I thought that most characters in sidescrollers use a simple bounding box for collision, but that would mean that a slope would cause the bounding box to only collide at the outer edge and the sprite would sort of "float" in mid air. Yours not only doesn't do that, it also adjusts the angle of the feet.

It's actually a simple rectangular bounding box. The way I handle slopes, is checking for collision at x + xspeed, y + yspeed, allowing a variation of -16/+16 pixels in the vertical axis. If there's still collision at y-16, the character will have to jump that slope.

To avoid the floating feet al I do is changing that part of the sprite according to the terrain configuration.

Is this being done by way of IK or is it just a separate animation all together? I suspect the second one.

Really nice detail though. If I'm going to knitpick, the shadow is floating off the cliff side.

You should consider just going to a blob shadow, so much easier.

It's only a separate sprite for that body part. About the floating shadow, I'm already fixing it. I found a simple way to do it without altering what the shadow looks like.

I'm assuming that the shadow is a squished player sprite?

Without knowing how you handle your forground layer, I'm guessing that it should not be too hard to clip the shadow to the forground using a shader (i.e. only draw shadow if there is a forground pixel underneath).
I'm not sure if it can be done without shaders in GM:Studio.


Also how do you do the trailing piece of cloth? it seems to be some physics object following the main sprite

I don't know if I can do that since I'm using tiles for this. I've looked into it and so far GM has no decent way to mask a sprite into another one like that.

Still, I found a not so quick but less expensive way: I remove the excess of shadow by negative-drawing. I have 4-5 silhouette sprites for that purpose. I place them as objects in the room editor, then the object drawing the shadow does all the magic.

That cloth is a very primitive physics object following the character's sprite.

 

[Pehesse]

The problem with my job is that it eats up a lot of my time (i work 8 hours/day) and when i get home i'm too tired to keep working on my projects. At the moment i have savings to survive for a while so i was thinking in taking some months off and try to create something.

My other option is to enter the (mobile) game industry and gain some experience.

That's pretty dangerous. I'd suggest waiting and honing your skills. I understand you're tired after a normal workday, but deving full time when you know (a little) about what you're doing already requires the same kind of dedication and energy... so imagine if you're trying to learn the ropes in addition to that. I say that mostly because you say you give up easy, which is something you might want to work on before trying to dev "for real".
I'd suggest trying to find the rhythm and motivation to get stuff done on the side in addition to your work (may not need to be anything more than 30mn a day, or something similar - what's important is building stamina, not producing actual content). Then, when you think you have a nice rhythm going and a solid grasp on where you might head with a game idea were you to quit your job... *then* consider that. Otherwise you greatly risk spending quite a few months simply learning tools and starting on several ideas, getting discouraged, and starting over, and over, and over.
Don't want to sound like a downer, but devving *is* a real job (especially solo), and shouldn't be undertaken lightly. I wouldn't advise it without solid prior experience, nor without a few years' worth of resources ahead, depending on the scale of the project you're aiming for. Even for a smaller phone app, I wouldn't recommend anything less than 6 months for your first try.

THAT SAID! I'm only talking about quitting your job for devving. Do keep coming here, as you said, for motivation and discussion, and hopefully build your skills and stamina alongside us!

I won't quit my day job until I have something really cool to show for it after working nights/weekends.

....or that, much more simply said.

In other news, that's me tonight. (Actually it's only a part of the last animation sketched today).
Bragging minute: marathoned the 25 sketches (=320 images) needed for the match in 3 days, new record for me so I'm happy!! At the start of the project, I did that same amount in... at least a couple of weeks, if not months.
Now to line/color it all. I hope playing Jurassic Park in a loop in the background will be enough to keep me focused :v

 

[UsagiWare]

I don't know if I can do that since I'm using tiles for this. I've looked into it and so far GM has no decent way to mask a sprite into another one like that.

Still, I found a not so quick but less expensive way: I remove the excess of shadow by negative-drawing. I have 4-5 silhouette sprites for that purpose. I place them as objects in the room editor, then the object drawing the shadow does all the magic.

I would've never guessed you are using tiles, there seems to be very little repetition going on. How big are these tiles?

And I don't quite understand your solution of negative-drawing, could you explain it further?

 

[Ito]

I would've never guessed you are using tiles, there seems to be very little repetition going on. How big are these tiles?

And I don't quite understand your solution of negative-drawing, could you explain it further?

I use variable size tiles. The trick here is having enough different tiles so you don't get that impression of repetitiveness. Also GM Tiles have properties you can tweak (scale, opacity, color blending, rotation) thus making it easier to to avoid such effect. It also helps when you're blending different parts. GM Tile system is probably one of the bests out there.

Negative drawing is what I call drawing a sprite, background, or particle in subtractive blending mode. I'm not sure I can explain properly what subtractive blending is, but basically, what it does is subtracting values instead of replacing (normal blend mode) or adding (additive blend mode).

That means, if you draw a white sprite in subtractive blending, it will subtract 255 from whatever color there's below.

Doing this in the default layer where the game is rendered will cause the sprite to leave a black silhouette. However, if you use subtractive blending in a different layer (in GM those are called surfaces), you can use it to subtract alpha from whatever there's drawn underneath, thus making it transparent.

Since I render Hibari's shadow into a separate "surface", I can trim her shadow using white sprites drawn in subtractive blend mode. They must have the shape of the cliff she's standing on, thats for sure, but it doesn't have to be 100% accurate, so having 4-8 different shaped sprites to use as "mold" to trim the sprite is more than enough.

 

[Jobbs]

Stencyl staff just worked with me to implement a new compiler which somehow magically compiles dramatically faster. It's a HUGE step forward for stand alone development using Stencyl.

A cached compile would take a minute or two (as some of you have seen on stream), but a fresh compile, which is triggered any time a new resource is added, would take 35+ minutes.

With this new test compiler, it uses some kind of alternate method to do a fresh compile in about 2 minutes. 2 minutes.

The game runs with slightly impaired performance at times (a stutter here and there), but for testing purposes it's no problem.

Big change.

 

[Ito]

Stencyl staff just worked with me to implement a new compiler which somehow magically compiles dramatically faster. It's a HUGE step forward for stand alone development using Stencyl.

A cached compile would take a minute or two (as some of you have seen on stream), but a fresh compile, which is triggered any time a new resource is added, would take 35+ minutes.

With this new test compiler, it uses some kind of alternate method to do a fresh compile in about 2 minutes. 2 minutes.

The game runs with slightly impaired performance at times (a stutter here and there), but for testing purposes it's no problem.

Big change.

I'm glad for you man, I know what a slow compile time is. Congrats. Honestly, I think that rewriting all of the assets just because you changed/added one was just dumb.

GM also has a test-friendly compile mode. As you said, performance is irregular, and in GM you also get blurry graphics every now and then. Once you compile for good that doesn't happen anymore.


By the way, finished fixing that shadow thing:

I should probably add a transition animation between the walk pose and the oh-fuck-i'm-falling pose.

 

[electroflame]

Well, looks like Visual Studio 2015 requires signing-in to a Microsoft account, no matter what edition you have.

Having a trial to the "free" version is laughable.

*sigh* I guess I have to to activate it, but I'm signing out as soon as it's done its phone-home garbage where it inevitably invades my privacy in some unannounced and unspecified way.

 

[Blizzard]

Well, looks like Visual Studio 2015 requires signing-in to a Microsoft account, no matter what edition you have.

Having a trial to the "free" version is laughable.

*sigh* I guess I have to to activate it, but I'm signing out as soon as it's done its phone-home garbage where it inevitably invades my privacy in some unannounced and unspecified way.

It's probably nothing compared to what Windows 10 does. I don't know if that makes you feel better or worse though.

 

[electroflame]

It's probably nothing compared to what Windows 10 does. I don't know if that makes you feel better or worse though.

Well, that's why I'm still on Windows 7.

It also looks like you can't complete the registration with any Internet Explorer version below IE 11, so I don't know what I'm going to do. I have IE 8 installed to test web compatibility, so basically I'm hosed.

Thanks Microsoft.

 

[Blizzard]

Well, that's why I'm still on Windows 7.

It also looks like you can't complete the registration with any Internet Explorer version below IE 11, so I don't know what I'm going to do. I have IE 8 installed to test web compatibility, so basically I'm hosed.

Thanks Microsoft.

Upgrading to Windows 10 would get you IE11. It's almost like they did this on purpose!

 

[Lautaro]

Anyone care to share their experiences with the Humble Store? worth the time? not worth the time?

 

[Pehesse]

Here's a follow-up to my previous post about process, this time about lining, to expand on my answer about copy/pasting parts of the image!

Again I start with the idle since it's the basis for all my other moves. For each individual frame, I have something like this, more or less defined (sometimes completely sketchy).

First step is to line the first frame.
This is where the mirror/flip frame we discussed earlier in the thread comes in handy. To get the onion skin effect, I set the layer opacity to something around 25-30% (based on the brightness of my screen, your mileage may of course vary). Also, for clarity's sake, I do the sketch in a different color than the line - it helps here, but it's mostly for later.

(side note: to color the line rapidly, I use a mask layer, which you can get in photoshop by creating a new layer on top of the layer you want the mask to be applied on, then alt-clicking on the space between the two layers. It'll make an arrow appear, and everything you do on the top layer will affect only what's visible on the layer underneath)

Now I get to slice some parts based on what I intend to reuse. Note that this coloring isn't an actual step, but a screen made to clarify what happens.

In blue is what I copy/paste to a different layer (namely: the head). This is what I intend to save and reuse for many frames and animations, as it's also one of the most time consuming elements to redraw every time. If you don't animate it, might as well keep it!

In red are the elements I'll need to redraw for every frame. Nothing to save here.

In green are the elements that aren't moving in this specific animation, but I won't keep for many others.

For both green and blue, I then do a second version.

Here, I've redrawn the green part on a new layer, and the head part is yet another layer I've redrawn separately, then copied and merged with a slight tilt.
At this stage I now have two main layers for my current animation, and two "save for reuse" head layers stored safely outside of the anim folder.
I can now safely copy and paste those two main layers in sequence to create the animation base, while still having the vibrating line effect (so it goes 1->2->1->2, etc).

Here's a closeup of the differences between the two main layers. Totally the same thing! Depending on how precise you are with your redrawing, the vibrant line effect is more or less pronounced. If you don't want any such effect, you can copy and paste instead, of course... but then, most of this process isn't what you're looking for, anyway :-D

Now for the fun part! It's time to fill in the missing parts from your sequence, the parts that actually move. For this, I need to overlay both my sketch, and the actual line of the previous frame. This is where color differences come in really handy!


And that's about it for the lining process (and now, all the magic's gone). The more your character moves during an animation, the less stuff you'll be able to salvage. For most anims, expect to skip the parts about saving anything, and just redraw every frame from scratch!
If you want, I'll do another of these for the coloring!

 

[Blizzard]

Pehesse, you should consider making your own book some time.

Or if you have infinite free time and hate money, putting it on the web for free I guess.