Tactics Cafè Devlog #2 - Spine 2D & Directions (Patreon)

Heya guys o/

Back again with a new devlog! 

Last week, I mentioned I'd have Io's animations done, which I ended up deciding against actually working on his animations and instead used a placeholder character. This is because I realised that I should probably test out the animation system first and make sure of it before going into finalised artwork/animations and potentially wasting a lot of time having to remake or scrap them if I end up not being able to use it. 

So for now, meet Testy, your local placeholder girl~ 

Let's get into what I've been working on:

 Spine 2D Animations

Each playable and enemy character in the game will be animated using Spine 2D, which is a neat lil software for 2D skeletal animations, meaning that I can create a rig like a 3D model but in 2D!  This'll allow me to more easily animate all my characters compared to frame-by-frame animation and potentially add cosmetics by switching sprites around if I wanted to!

Each character's animations are built up of 2 Directions, Southwest and Northwest, and in those directions you have the actual animations which will be called in the correct scenarios. E.g. "SW/Hurt" will be called when the character gets damaged and is facing south west!  NE and SE directions are just SW and NW flipped!

Directions

The next thing I worked on was a system that keeps track of what direction each character is facing, and depending on the camera angle, what animation should be shown to do so. 

To keep code talk short, it was a simple switch case statement of the camera's direction and a switch case statement inside of the character's facing direction, which also might be flipped. After that, the correct animation is called by using an enum that keeps track of all the possible animations! 

The end result is as you can see! When running though, I had to also code a new function which would be able to tell what direction the next tile the character is moving too is, which also wasn't too difficult as it was a simple comparison of the coordinates of tile a vs tile b and figuring out the direction from there!

What's Next?

Alright, so for next devlog I want to start working on the attacking/casting animation system which will use a mixture of the above spine 2D animations and unity's particle system to create some cool effects! This will also involve creating the hurt animations and playing it on the impact of an attack/skill.

And one more thing, we'll be meeting someone new next devlog <3