It started with a trip to Singapore.
This was a natural deadline to get AdventureKit to 1.0.
It was going so well. In the last week, I had added my first animated walk cycle and even included some reach animations for my main character.
One of the exercises from the Art and Science of Drawing pcourse on Skillshare was to accurately capture an organic object, like this here pepper.
This was from week 8. Previous post shows my work from week 1. Imma go ahead and say the course helped.
Recently completed the Art and Science of Drawing on Skillshare. It’s a good course with an emphasis on precise observation and practice. These are the flowers from week 1.
I have a trigger component that can cause things to happen in my games as a response to other events. Each trigger has various properties (animation, sound, movement) that the trigger component uses to update other components.
I have spent the last few weeks learning about animating in After Effects with the powerful Duik Bassel plugin by following Jake Bartlett’s amazing video series on Skillshare.
I think I now have a firm grasp of how basic rigging works in Duik and I wanted to summarise it here in case future me forgets the details (likelihood: high).
Levelling Up My Skills
After creating the ultimate guide to animation tools on the mac, I have settled on using After Effects with Duik Bassel to do my animating.
Unfortunately, learning how to use the tools is the easy bit.
I’m using Scrivener to draft the puzzle document for my first adventure game and I’m using Grim Fandango’s document as a template.
Initially, I created the room layout in Affinity Designer on the iPad and exported it as an image which was then embedded into a Scrivener document.
One of the things that I got stuck on last year while developing AdventureKit was tracking state. After coming back to it again this year I realise I was coming at it from the wrong direction.
As I start animating, I’ll be using apps like After Effects and Adobe Animate that don’t have the same kind of asset generation abilities of apps like Photoshop and Sketch.
These animation apps do have the ability to export the animation as a sequence of PNG files and it is possible with these apps to export the files at the different sizes required for Xcode.
As my workday leans more towards asset generation rather than straight coding, I’ve started looking at different tools available for creating and animating characters.
The art style I’m aiming for in my games is cartoony but won’t be pixel art so, while there are many great (and often free or low-cost) pixel art animation tools, I won’t be discussing them here.