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thejinx

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A member registered Aug 24, 2015 · View creator page →

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What a fun looking font you've made! What license is this under please?

Same, reported here  https://steamcommunity.com/app/2299510/discussions/1/6169410450157204573/

This rocks! Just in time for needing this feature in a big way too. Much <3 & aubergines to you :o)

Thats awesome news! Great progress :D

Will the mask layers be an alpha channel like a lightmap or something similar, so we could do stuff like have a gradient to the mask also?

Or provide an API for community to create importers

Hi Noesteryo, great job on the script!

Noticed a bit of an issue so thought I'd leave it here; I'm probably in the minority but I use the desktop client for itch predominantly.

The client doesn't know how to handle .lua files, so just fails and doesn't download/'install'. Might be worth packaging into a .zip or something if you'd like desktop people to be able to download without popping open a web browser.

Thanks again!

Yeah originally I was thinking it would be nice to use an animation multiple times within the same project, then you'd avoid most the pitfalls of resources being unavailable.

I hadn't thought initially about exporting animations from the project and allowing for them to be imported/edited/used in other projects or shared/collaborated on until this dialog started.

As its developed further, the concept of making animations available cross-project is really compelling. I can just see a vibrant marketplace or user community openly exchanging animations. Pretty cool stuff!

I'm Looking forward to seeing what you come up with if its a feature that can make it onto the roadmap! :)

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I was originally thinking that having re-usable animations just within the one project would have been great, but having them be truly common and able to be shared would be amazing.

I haven't taken the time unfortunately to inspect how the project internals are arranged, so some if not all of this probably won't be applicable, but it might stimulate some thought at least?:

  • A Timeline is an arbitrary range used to define the length of an animation.
  • A Track is an array of property changes, one for each property type; x position, y position, rotation, shader property xyz plotted against a Timeline.
  • An Animation is a collection of Tracks, properties of which are interpolated between when 'played'. These are stored to disk as json or other human readable file type x.anim.
  • A Sequence is a collection of Animations with an optional list of conditions to play, loop or stop a given animation within the sequence. These are optionally stored to disk as json .seq files.

The animations and sequences can either be stored in a shared library location that is system-wide or project-wide, and will be automatically nested inside a folder structure which makes sense canonically.

In the user interface, a Sequence is what the user interacts with. When an Animation or Sequence is either imported or created, their usual properties are exposed in addition to new ones for retargeting/offsetting. This allows the user to specify the sprite to be used and manually align its origin to the vector path of the animation(s) it will act in. [essentially in the background gives all sprites a bone which can be bound to the vector path of an animation]

Mappings to sprites for use within animations and sequences will be retained within the project file itself.

Any animation or sequence files on disk should remain up to date. A file watcher could observe changes and warn of outdatedness / offer to update to latest versions for each given animation.

If not already the case to make projects more portable, used sprites could be imported into the project folder and linked relatively. Would be kinda cool for collaborative animation.


What do you think?

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Please consider allowing animations to be objects which can be nested inside one another.

As an example: the user could create animation 'shooting', which would be a gun sprite recoiling, producing a muzzle flare, etc

The shooting animation would be listed in a 'project animations' panel or some such library for the project.
User can drag/drop this shooting animation object into the timeline of any other animation they are currently editing.

The shooting animation object's timeline will be triggered on the frame it is inserted into the parent's timeline.

Macromedia/Adobe flash had this type of system and it was an invaluable addition for time saving in even moderately complex animation sequences. I'm big on modularity and re-using things I've already made if for nothing else than visual consistency when wanting to use an animation in different contexts. Edit: Also dramatically simplifies each individual timeline, separation of concerns and all that.

Thanks!

Works just like the current implementation of scaling/skewing, but with additional control points in a mesh arrangement over the sprite. Bonus points if the user can define the mesh density too! :)

Thanks! I'll grab a license in anticipation. Cudos on being so active by the way. 

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yeah I'd usually write a shader, but having this kind of functionality inside the art pipeline would be very useful. Thanks for the example; I didn't have time to put something together  to better get the point over :D

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Would be pretty game changing for me to be able to use a layer as a clipping mask within an animation. Would have so much potential, not least of which for automating common tasks.

As an example: If I wanted to make a shine effect for all pickups, I could just bring in a gradient and translate it from left/right side of canvas as the 'light'. Bring in a sprite of say a crown with a transparent bg. Clip the 'light' to the crown sprite and now the light is only visible over filled area of the crown, i.e. not the background or other transparent areas. In this example it would allow me to use exactly the same animation for all my pickups, ensuring visual consistency.

If the clipping mask itself can also be animated this would have a pretty limitless potential!

Thanks

I'd really appreciate the ability to choose where to install this as I find dumping into local appdata kinda rude.

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The last update to the Steam version at least was 24/09/19. There's a forum post where the dev replied to similar concerns on Jan 2021 to say its not dead. Seems there have been difficulties of some kind and the project is still going to be maintained, though it read to me at least that it may be a long time coming.

I'd recommend grabbing it as it is good for what is here, its just lacking a lot of quality of life tools and options.

Hope this helps.