Game Journal #49 - Finally, All Done (Patreon)

Here is this week's update. I'm making it available to all patrons because I honestly feel bad that I've focused so much energy on getting these art assets finished, I hadn't had time to get a comic sketch up. I want all patrons to feel included so I'm opening this one up so there's something for all tiers to read.

This week I wanted to round out the last conditional animations for Frank's boss encounter so I can get them exported and off to Jason to put into our game engine.  I tried to think of what player actions I don't need that I can skip for Frank, and at first I thought, "oh, he shouldn't be able to be knocked down in the conventional ways, i.e. from dash attacks or throws or exceeding a threshold of damage" and it was a relief that I could skip all that.  Then I remembered that three of the four player characters have special abilities that cause knockdown, and because that's even remotely possible to use on a boss, I had to do the assets for it.

To save time I started by blocking in a basic getup animation, and then made a copy of it to alter to account for the two weapon states and neutral poses. It saved me a bunch of time and works just fine, so I'm happy to check that item off the list.  The knockdown animation was just copied and the @___@ eyes are replaced with X___X eyes. I did it for both phase one and phase two sets, before I realized that Frank technically can't die in phase one- he just enters phase two at that point. I was about to delete the art assets but then I thought, what if a player finds a way to kill him before he can enter phase two? Would the game try to load non-existent assets and crash? So even though that should never happen, I'm keeping the art assets there just in case.

One item that's been on my to-do list also involves player specials. Lizzie's special puts enemies in a special knockback state where they have a hitbox that is contageous, causing other enemies hit by it to knockback and hit other enemies, and so on. This state needs a distinct visual cue so players can tell that it's unique, so I decided to start with Frank before retroactively applying it to everyone else.

I managed to get this working in just three frames so I'm thrilled, it'll be no  time to draw everyone else in the knockback spiral.  The big pain was sorting out how the body should be turned and contorted in each of the three frames to convey the illusion of spinning, but I think I got it down. I'll just draw everyone else in the same pose and the effect will work.  Also, since Frank's phase one side swing will also have this effect, the player characters need a spinout animation of their own.  Fair is fair, after all.

The last major animation task of this update was to give Frank a proper intro.  The intro needs to be stage-agnostic and serve as a good segue into the fight, so I decided to make it so he can hop in from the side of the screen or drop in from the top and bellow at you like an ogre.

One of our previous side projects, a game called Case The Joint, had a chat system we built the code for.  One thought for boss encounters is we have a short dialogue between one of the active player characters and the boss, so I figure for Frank he can hop in, then talk, then bellow at you when he's done talking and then it's fight time, so I built this animation in two parts with a neutral state in between recovering from landing and turning to holler.

Since this is the last of Frank's assets I can get him packed up and off to the game engine.  I promise, I super-duper double-sundae swear that I'll get the next comic page done ASAP.  I'm sorry about that big wait but this lunkhead was killing me and I just wanted to power through his animations.  Thank you for your patience and support.