Dev Update #3 - Pred Party! - Belly Physics (Patreon)

Back again with a new update! No playable versions this time (I'm still working on stuff), but I wanted to update on what I'm currently muddling through: Belly Physics!

So, approaching this game, there were two ways to do belly animations for preds: hand animated or procedural. Hand animated is always a possibility, and may end up looking great (See my Fomo animation for an example of that), but I am one guy with not a lot of time, and the belly sizes I wanted to work with (small, medium for 1-2 people, or HUGE and over-encumbered) would mean three separate animations just for walking, and more for struggles. And they'd be the exact same for every pred.

Instead, I decided to try out some procedural animations! I started out attempting soft body physics, which is a lot like having a ball of jello that you give weight and cursed existence to, and then apply the forces of gravity to make it (kinda) do what you want. The results of that were promising at the start!

I liked the weight/heft of it! It's mesmerizing at the full 60 fps, haha.

Unfortunately, this all broke apart once I wanted to manipulate it in any way that changed the size/dimensions of it, so I had to pivot gears immediately. Soft body was just too unpredictable for what I needed. So, on to my next idea: Jigglebones!

I'm using Godot to run my game, and you can use a Skeleton2D node and it's associated "bones" to deform a polygon and it's texture (in my case, a circle). It took some figuring out how to get the bones to work properly, and I likely need to add more bones to get a similar effect as above, but it's definitely a start!

I've included the full clips below as well (with sound even)! The ending for Jay eating the player shows off a lot of what you can do with jiggle bones. That's all procedural and took like 10 minutes of futzing around to animate how I wanted!

Going forward I want to add in dynamic struggles, bouncing, and squirming, as well as more gravity deformation (which will likely come as I use more bones to fill out the belly). This was all done with only 3 jigglebones.

Next time I'll take about shaders and how I'm overlaying the belly on only parts of the sprites and not all of it. Take care everyone! ♥