I admit I forgot to post a diary entry yesterday so I’ve rolled it into this one.
Yesterday I need to find some animation software that was easier than Spine or Spriter that I was previously using for the player animation. Both of these applications, although very good, get a bit complicated when you’re trying to create a frame based animation instead of a bone based one.
Fortunately, I found Synfig Studio, a free open source 2d animation package. After going through a quick tutorial I imported my player character bits and animated the walk cycle once more. Why am I redoing it? I discovered that the shadow around the player was too heavy and looked really odd during the flashback sequence so it had to go.
Using Synfig it looks much better and as an added bonus Synfig exports out a perfect spritesheet that I could import into GMS2 and split into frames automatically. Nice!
I also set up my own personal Git server on my network UDOOx86 so I could make progressive backups. After a lot of research on what to use I opted for the lightweight Gitea.
And so on to today. Today I wanted to try my hand at paths. For this first confrontation with the Police I would only need premade paths, so I drew the routes I wanted the 3 officers to make through the reception area. At the moment they wouldn’t notice or care about the player as this was just to get them from point A to point B correctly – and to queue them up so that they start moving after the initial dialogue sequences have ended.
As you might have seen a couple of posts ago I had put together a headless Police Officer. He needed a little more work to straighten out his gun arm and to make sure he was aiming down the middle. Once that was done he (or she) was imported in GMS2 and positioned ready on the paths. Then I just needed to script the officer to assign one of the 3 paths to him, get him to face the direction of his movement and set him off on his merry way.
This all worked brilliantly and all I had to do was to tweak the movement speed here and there, and tweak the path to avoid clipping walls, etc and I was pretty much done. The only thing that remained was his head.
For this, I thought that it would be cool to randomly assign a head to each officer when they are created. For the time being, I’m using the heads from the flashback NPCs and that is looking pretty cool.
The next challenge for the weekend will be to engage with the player if he’s decided to hang around too long. This is where things are going to get complicated 🙂
