Game Journal #85 - Oops! More Revisions (Patreon)

I feel like I need to preface this post with an apology.  I was like, okay, revisions are done so I can get back into comics, I just need to finish up the little bit I started at the end of last week.  And then I started plugging more things into the game engine and I had more things to do, so I thought, okay, I'll just push these last revisions forward while I still have momentum and then start the comic closer to Friday.  I ended up pushing another week of game development, so I apologize for not having more comic work up, but This Time I think I really have just cleared off everything I need to draw for the core of this game.  Drawing all the art for this game has been a Herculean effort and I really just want to push it past this milestone and move forward with other things, so thank you for bearing with me while I try to plant a flag at the top of this mountain.

Moving forward, it's time to report what I worked on this week!  There's a little bit of work for all four characters so I'll just go down in order.

When I was doing my primary revision pass on Lizzie one thing I wanted to try changing was her melee back attack, since it always felt just a little bit off, but nothing I tried really came out right.  The criteria for a back attack is the character needs to do an attack that turns them around facing the other way without using a big smear arc, and conveys a "pushing back" kind of gesture.  I've tried things like giving Lizzie a pool cue attack with her mop, twirling the mop around her back, doing a spinning attack around her body with the mop, and nothing really fit five frames and ended in a neutral state facing the other way, so I put off making any other changes.  

This week, however, I realized what I didn't like about the original animation- the leg kinda pulls down after one frame of kicking, which kinda killed the impact of the hit.  So what I did was I went into my existing sprites and I just edited the kicking legs in the fourth and fifth frame so the kick stays out more solidly and then she pulls the leg back inward, which makes it feel a lot more like a strong pushing attack than the image above.  I'll show this off in a moment.

One of the other changes I made was to not just Lizzie's but every character's melee divekick.  The way I used to draw them, as you can see in the header image of this article, was kinda abstracted and arrow-like with a pointed heel, since I wanted them to come down quickly from above, but it loses impact when the leg just becomes this vague shape, so I changed it to emphasize kicking with the sole of her boot.  After plugging this and the back attack changes into the game engine I decided to try and mock up a little attack combo to see how the fit together:

The more defined boot and the snappier kick both look much better.  Also as a small side note: the first .gif I posted was an earlier mockup when the base frame duration was 0.1s each frame in an earlier state of the game; we've since dialed up the animation speed and now the average attack animation frame duration is 0.07s, so the whole game is about 30% faster than it originally was.

The last change I made to Lizzie was a global change I made to everyone.  Originally we had an animation that played when you attempt a grab and you don't grab anyone, it would switch to a two-frame animation where the characters scramble to grab at nothing:

This is currently mapped as the top layer of the Action button.  If you stand near a soccerball and press Action then that button will kick the ball, but if you are just standing in neutral and press it you'll attempt a grab.  When we put these actions into the engine what ended up happening was the Action button became a "silly flailing" button where it wasn't really clear what the character was trying to achieve.  Also, we set it up so you could cancel a run animation into a throw so you could combo someone and then run up and throw them more fluidly, but the throw whiff animation was shorter than our dash skid animation, so pressing throw whiff out of dash was more efficient and 100% more optimal than just letting go of the stick to skid to a halt, and that felt like a balance problem, like you would always have to throw whiff to stop your dashes.  The solution to all of these problems was to add an extra frame at the end of throw whiff, where the flailing solidifies into a sustained pose.  Dash skidding was .24s long and throw whiff was .16s long, but with a sustained third frame the throw whiff animation becomes .32s long, so it's not the de facto best option anymore.

Here's a demonstration of the new throw whiff frame, as well as a successful dash grab.  Lizzie ends up reaching forward after the throw whiff so it's like, okay she wanted to grab something, that's what this button does. It communicates much better than just leaving it as just the flailing part.  Everyone got a new throw whiff pose to accompany frame adjustments, so that was an entire day's work for me.

Alice's art, as usual, is mostly spot-on and I got her just right the first time, but this week she got some new items rather than fixes to existing items.  One of the changes we made to our combat rules were about ranged divekicks.  Previously, both ranged and melee modes used the same divekick, but the attack didn't really serve the needs of the ranged moveset yet.  One of the key distinctions we make between ranged and melee modes is that melee attacks are short and horizontally wide and when you connect with them they push the enemy further away from you, so if they don't move forward they eventually end up out of melee space.  Ranged has a far, narrow damage range and the bullets cause hitstun but they don't push an enemy away, so they can make headway getting closer to you.  The distinction is meant to keep any weapon style from being more powerful than the other by a large margin- the old divekick where you cruise downward on a \ diagonal angle was really useful for melee mode because you could engage from further away and begin a combo, or move closer after pushing an enemy away, but it didn't really work for ranged because ranged wants to keep people away, and jumping close to them with no pushback means that you just immediately put yourself in the danger zone.

What we did was we took the existing divekick code and we added a condition for ranged mode that removes the X axis movement from the attack, letting you come straight down instead of moving forward.  Giving this divekick variant more pushback similar to a back attack means that when a character in ranged mode is confronted by enemies who are too close they can jump and axe kick down on them to push them away and create enough space to do a little bit of ranged damage, which is a lot more useful than the alternative.  This is a new fix to an emergent problem so it may need some tinkering over time but the logic is in place so I added the art assets to accommodate it.  I basically just edited the old divekick sprites to make the leg stick out more forward so I wasn't drawing the whole thing from scratch and it does the job just fine.

Alice's grab whiffs ended up being fun to draw- she attempts to grab from an underhand pose so for her ranged variant I ended up making her look incredulous at not being able to grab what she's aiming for:

Since our game is in a 3D engine using 2D sprites we do our aligning and setup using Orthogonal cameras, meaning peripheral angles don't really distort what the camera sees, it's all just straight forward from your perspective.  The white cross below Alice's foot is the 0,0 point the sprites align to, and when I export the art assets from Photoshop I always add a pink dot to the center of the grey shadow you can see in a lot of the Photoshop mockups, so when I import the assets into the engine we just need to line the pink dots up with the white cross and the animation is aligned perfectly.

The bulk of Monday's changes have involved trying to streamline his shooting animations to make them look more controlled and deliberate and to try to iron out the flailing he was doing.  One of the cases I revisited in my previous revision pass was his air attack- he would shoot each gun one at a time in the air.  

This was more clear than the previous version but it still looked like he was flailing when used in the game engine.  I pinpointed the problem as being the fact that he shot both guns one at a time.  Monday's air attack is a very fast animation, he shoots a bullet on the very first frame it's active, so there's not really any room to breathe and it looks too frantic and scattered.  The solution I came up with is to make both shots fired from the same gun, but he puts his other hand over his arm so it looks like how a cowboy would hipfire two shots really quickly:

This solves another issue I had, where I wanted to balance out his left/right gun usage.  When facing right he will fire his left pistol twice in his base combo and the right one once, and use his left pistol to shoot behind him in the back attack.  The air attack using the right pistol for two shots puts his shooting attacks at an even three shots per pistol per direction facing, so my brain is content with the symmetry.  Also on display in this game engine gif is Monday's axe kick, just to cap off his new features.

Last week I left off with Lou's new run animation half-finished.  I got that cleaned up nicely and plugged into the engine, and right away you can see his leg motion better matches the speed at which he's moving:

This is I feel a much better animation for someone who is eager to help fix a problem!

Lou received the same animation changes as everyone else, so when I was wrapping up I decided to do an experiment and see if I couldn't salvage his original air attack animation.  Last week's post talks about the changes I made from the big body splash to the little cannonball animation, but I decided to try and save the original using as little work as possible by converting it into an X-shaped strike:

I wanted this to combo out of his ground attacks well but when I plugged it into the game engine it ended up looking like he took up way too much space in the air so I reverted it back to the cannonball sprite.  The shadow at their feet is what I use as my measure for how much space a character's body should take up, and I mostly treat it like the little stand on a plastic army figure.  Lou's arms spreading out as wide as they do at the end of this animation makes him too "big", so I was right to change this animation the first time.  It was nice to be able to do this experiment because I could change the art on my end and plug things into my copy of the game engine to see how they work without having to bother Jason at all, I just undo the frame alignments and leave the original sprites where they were and the animation is back how I started without any extra work from anyone else.

This week I will, absolutely, 100% focus entirely on making my next comic page.  This game work all really needed to be done to finalize the specific part of the game we're currently building, so I just carried the momentum forward an extra week.  Thank you, again, for your patience with our work, I think we're right where we need to be right now.