babusgames
patreon
June Update
🕑 Added 2019-06-04 11:00:23 +0000 UTCHello everybody!
As you see, I'm going to try a slightly different art style for Into the Forest's next chapter. I know it's a risky move, but I'm sure this will bring some fresh air and meh I'm just joking!
Into the Forest Chapter 6 will come at the end of this month and it will have the same art style of the rest of the saga, of course!
This pic is just a screenshot of a small project I'm working on in my free time regarding one important issue I've been struggling with: the animation system.
You see, the animation system I've used in Into the Forest and A date with Earth-Chan is frame-based, meaning that I just import a lot of different images into the engine. This gives me some nice artistic freedom but at a high-cost: it makes the games A LOT more heavy and resource-demanding. Those über-long loading screens before the game starts? That's also because of this.
So I'm experimenting with engine-based animations. For this matter, I've bought a software called Spine2D and it looks pretty cool. I'm still learning how to use it, but I'm sure it will be worth the effort!
I will release my first Spine animation pretty soon! And yep, I'm trying a WarioWare-ish art style for this one. I've been always interested in Ko Takeuchi's style (Wario Ware, Rhythm Heaven), so I guessed this small experiment was a good chance to play a bit with it.
And of course, don't worry about Into the Forest: it won't be delayed a single day because of this!
Cheers,
Babus
Comments
Babus
Thanks for your insight! Yep, there's a lot of people using frame per frame animations, but for me it's getting a bit inconvenient: it's hard to stuff a lot of content into a game if there is a build size limit (most of websites do). As you say, I could just reduce the framerate, but I think I can avoid that if I manage to get good results with engine animations -which also would just remove 90% of the build weight right away. Regarding the super long load times, this issue only happens in web browser. There are also some bugs related to RAM that make the game crash in some low-end PCs, so I think this might be a good solution to it.
Steven W.
Where's my earlier comment? Did I delete it by mistake? I was saying that while it's commendable to try to use an engine, most devs seem to do fine with frame-based animations. Many go as low as 5-6 frames for the whole animation. You could try to find a sweet spot between that and your current, super-fluent animations, if you want to save space. I don't know what you mean by super-long load times. I could notice a delay when launching a game and going straight into the animation gallery and clicking on an animation (rather than loading a savestate). But this happens just once, takes 3-4 seconds of waiting, it didn't bother me. Probably depending on HDD speed, as the game needs to be read from there? I think as long as you keep the chapters the size that they are currently, and only load a chapter at a time, the loading time is fine.
