In a bit of a weird spot right now. I’ve been working on doing the animations for the first and likely most complex non-boss enemy of the game, and I’m starting to feel a bit depressed about it. Working on a bunch of very simple very similar pictures for a few weeks tends to get old, even if you feel proud of the result. I ran into this same issue working on the main character animations, and now as with then I’m going to have to figure out more kinds of work to mix in because this is starting to undermine my motivation to work on the project. I need to remember never to leave myself on the same animation task for more than a week or so, since it tends to do terrible things to my morale after a little while.
Because these guys aren’t quite symmetrical, but I didn’t want to create left and right facing versions, some interesting properties emerged. The most noticeable of these is where they actually momentarily drop their knife and then catch it in their other hand in the running turn animation, which nicely adds to the frantic and panicked feel of the animation and swaps hands so that when they run the other direction it looks natural. The strap holding up their clothing also quietly changes shoulder, and the light shifts to the other side of them, during the turn. I think these weird fudgings of reality will largely be invisible in action, but it was an interesting problem to figure out as I went, since I hadn’t really considered it before.
I had originally planned to make several different shapes of mask for these guys, but I think that’s something I’m unlikely to do now. To create each mask I’d have to do a bunch of drawings of the mask facing in different directions for the turn, add code to make it draw in front of or behind the head based on where they are in the current animation, and make sure the movement perfectly syncs up. That’s possible, but seems like a lot of work for something that might not look very good. Alternately I could just make a bunch of different animations for different masks, which, again, I don’t think will be worth the effort. That said, there are alternate versions of this enemy with different capabilities, so when I make them I can make their masks look different, which will be more communicative and less labor intensive than what I was planning on doing.
That’s mostly it for the last month, though I also did some miscellaneous work fixing bugs in path-finding, improving the cave tileset and building out the caves. The particle system is basically functional but is still not really an improvement on what I had before I started in any way, remaining extremely buggy when run in multi-threaded mode while still not quite performing as well as I’d hoped – for reasons which, as yet, remain mysterious.
I think for the next week or so I should focus on getting all of the editors working so that I can spend some time detailing the levels, adding foreground and background elements, generally making them feel finished – or as finished as they’re going to get until I finish making enemies for them.
I like these animations, but they’re not much to show for the better part of a month or work. I don’t know what to think about that: It doesn’t feel like I’ve been slacking. Maybe these guys were just difficult to animate.