Game Devlog 03 - Hero V3 (Patreon)

Before you start, embedded GIFs don't work in the Patreon mobile app. You need to open the browser version on your phone, or you can check the GIFs among the added pictures above.

This Devlog is not gonna be as long as the previous one, because now that I've coded the basics, I can work on smaller specific details. For instance, I wasn't really satisfied with the first design of the MC, so I made a lot of different versions, changed the proportions a bit, tried to get a bit inspired by Warioland and came up with this version.

He is a lot more streamlined than the previous version, I can animate him better and he has a shape, that's easier on the eyes. 

For a reference, this was the previous version.

The next question was tho, how to animate him? I used Clip Studio in the past weeks for animations, and it has some merits, but I cannot really achieve a good, fluid animation there (especially, because the preview lags like crazy for no reason, even in smaller resolutions)

I thought of a few options, made a few tests in Unity and these were our final contestants:

From left to right

No1 - The original version, drawn frame by frame in Clip Studio. Definitely the most work to draw frame by frame, but it has the merits that the animation looks a bit more natural.

No2 - This was made by cutting up the body parts, like arms, legs, crotch, torso, head, etc. and then making a virtual bone rig in Unity. As you can see, the animation is really fluid and I wish I could've used this method, but, this is more suited for simple animations, where you don't need to change angle or body parts (like my char needs to torn to the side, needs to crouch and crawl, etc), because once you made the rig, it's very unflexible. The bones need to be rearranged, and even if I swap the sprites, they get detached from the bones...
Here is a test I made for running (obviously I didn't redraw the sprites for the running, was only testing the swap ^^')

So majestic~♥ lol :D

No3 - I was wondering if there was a way to keep the "bone structure" of the character, but without the actual bones. And it turns out, it's possible, it just needs an incredible amount of preparation, all body parts need to be cut even further (upper arm, lower arm, hand, etc) and each needs to be drawn in a way, that they can rotate without leaving gaps. Because I had doubts about this from the beginning, I made colored blobs for most body parts and only tested it on the left arm. You can see that it works essentially... but it really needs pixel precision on every frame to not break, which in the end defeats the goal, to be productive and the movement looks just as unnatural as on No2.

"I'LL BE BAAAAAAAAAACK" - Yes, he looks a bit like the terminator. :D

No4 - Which brings us to the final version, with which I'm quite happy with.

I'm probably not gonna animate any further in Clip Studio. Not just because of the limited animator tools, but mostly because the preview lag makes it impossible to test what I've already drawn. Sooooooo Toon Boom to the rescue. I've been using Toon Boom in the past too, most of my old animations were made there and I'm not really a pro, but it has some neat rigging options and drawing by hand has no obstacles.

The first quick sketch looked neat, but was a bit too... energetic for an idle animation.

So I reworked the keyframes and filled them up. This was my final animation for the idle pose in Toon Boom. Nude and with Underwear. This is a mixture of tweening and frame by frame animation, which I think it really flexible and has all the possibilities I need.

This I exported then as a sequence of frames, about 30 PNG files without the background and fed it to Unity. I also made a simple normal map for the lighting for each frame, which is a real hassle and I'm gonna use spritesheets in the future (otherwise you need to update each frame individually in Unity to add the individual normal maps too).

Once I had all the normal maps, I added them to unity too and this is what the player currently looks like (I moved the light source around to show why the normal map is important. The alternative would be to shade the character in a painter program, but then it would look like the light is always coming from above and I want to add dynamic lights): 

(the nude version will be visible, when the player has less than 20% life, from 20 to 60% he will be in underwear and above 60% he will be clothed.)

Thank you for tuning in! I will share with you again, when I got more updates. Now that I've got the method I wanna use, I can continue and make the other animations too. I don't want to make the disney-level fluid, but I want to use a nice fluid framerate that's pleasant for the eyes.

Cheers~♥