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Hello!

I thought I'd start logging my progress as it's starting to get a little insane, yet my excitement for the game I've been working on for the best part of 4 years is starting to take some serious shape.

I seem to have a lot to say about the game; but I'm starting to feel I'm biting everyone's ears off when I tell them about it... so here I am; writing about it on here instead!!

Today I want to talk about the animation process.

I've been using Spriter - a tweening animation software. You import your assets, move the different limbs around within a timeframe, and animate it that way. Which is a little bit different from sprite animation; (which I also love to do). But I wanted super smooth, silky animation for this game (think Rayman Legends).

At first it was super painful to work with; as I kept changing designs and adding pieces to existing animations (near 100 now), but it's starting to look really good!

Why 100 animations?

Wasn't intentional....but as I kept adding features, I wanted new animations to accompany them. I'm not the biggest fan of lazy animations, or animations being reused unless it makes sense. I think I'm probably a bit nuts. I also really enjoy animation as a whole. Animation that has weight to it. Animation with kinetic flow. etc. etc.

Screenshot 5310

Looking good, PiN!


I love the smooth, flowing nature of animating this way. Although sometimes it can feel fake and floaty...but you can mediate that with time and practise.

The other advantage of this style over using frame by frame animation; is that you can *blend* animations. That's when one animation flows into the next one as if you made the animation yourself. It's a very minor feature, and it 100% should not replace animating things yourself. But it's good for things like a character naturally moving his legs, back into where they're placed in an idle stance, for example. It eliminates that sudden jerky jank from one animation to the next. But if you overdo it, you risk your character looking like he's always moving on butter glazed with baby oil.

Screenshot 5311

Simple resize the separate eyes for a nice blinking effect!

I realise I haven't posted anything else about the game... so this seems super random and out of context. I'll keep posting updates and hopefully the pieces will start falling into place.


For now, a very rough screenshot of the debug area!

Screenshot 5262

Messy. So very messy.


Okay, that's all for now! The next update will go into depth about some of the mechanics of the game.

Probably what I should have started with...


Ciao!

You can follow progress on PiN over on twitter (when I actually upload)

@z2team1




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Z2Team

Z2Team

2 members Developer

A 2-Man team of indie devs creating their first game: PiN! PiN is a horror-themed action platformer coming to Xbox One, and then to Android and iOS.

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