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.
As always, this is full of spoilers!
I think about this game a lot.
I think about how it starts with a woman trying to talk calmly to a man who has tied her up and is threatening to kill her just because she had the temerity to say no and how that’s even more relevant and relatable 26 years later.
In one of my many previous posts on screen sizes I mentioned that I have decided to use points and asset catalogs with scaled assets for AdventureKit.
Now that I’ve resigned myself to creating assets for all the different devices, I am looking for ways to automate this process as much as possible.
Photoshop has a number of different asset generation options, so that’s easy enough.
However, I do a lot of drawings and design on my iPad using apps like Procreate and Affinity Designer.
TL; DR: I made a Mac app that asks you a bunch of questions about your game and then tells you how to set up your SpriteKit scene and asset documents.
It’s called AdventureKit Answers and you can download it here.
I have written many, many, many posts about this topic.
A couple of weeks is all it took for me to revisit this.
It seems that Apple read my previous post about using iPad-sized assets across all devices and said to themselves “Best put a stop to that nonsense.”
I have a Direction enum that I use to position UI layers in my adventure game. It supports 8 compass directions plus a case for centre:
public enum Direction : String, CaseIterable, Codable {
case center, north, northeast, east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest
}
I’m going to be generating a lot of images over the coming months and I’ll be using many different apps to generate them.
So far, for my example adventure game, I’ve used Procreate, Adobe Comp, and Affinity Designer on the iPad and Photoshop on the Mac. I’ve also developed an asset management app on the Mac that I use to create the animation JSON data for my engine and that moves the assets into the asset catalog within the game bundle
I’ve been working on my AdventureKit engine and it turns out there are a lot of little drawings like UI buttons and inventory icons that need to be done for an adventure game
In some ways, they’re easier as there’s less pressure to make them stunning.
They’re not as splashy and exciting as rooms and characters but also players won’t be looking at them nearly as much.
They’re good to do when I’m feeling insecure or less inspired about my drawing—stick on some music and just start bashing ‘em out!
A lot of what drives my entities happens in pseudo-systems. These systems are GKComponent subclasses where the update(deltaTime:) method goes in an extension in order to separate the verb part of the component from the noun part: