A Licking Demo and Animation System showcase (Patreon)

Hi guys! Yokubo here.

I'm writing the post today since we wanted to talk a little bit about how the Animation System works 📽️.

The goal was to create an animation system that could bend sprites in a seamless way so we could achieve natural looking, flowy animations. Unity's native 2D animation system is good, but it works with bones. Bones are good for most 2D games, and since they are all joint based they are perfect for things like elbows and legs, but other parts like eyebrows and tongue end up feeling too mechanic.

This is why Pinou started developing our own animation tools that are all inspired by actual Photoshop tools. So in our animation system, all sprites are animated following curves and squares that can be distorted freely. As you can see here the same tongue sprite can be used to achieve different positions and it's very handy!

With the states in place, we can use Unity's native timeline to tell the engine how to transition between them and when. In the actual interactive system these will all be done procedurally, so the animations will be further broken down into smaller parts. For example, we'll have eye animations separated from mouth ones. That said, the body won't be animated by us since it'll be totally under your control! For that we'll just set the overall parameters so it looks good while you play with the character 🥵

This is it for this week, see you guys next friday!

Y.