Game Journal #195 - Big Hugs (Patreon)

This week's report is a bit late, as mentioned previously, but I want to keep my rhythm up so I got some stuff to share.  The comic page I think is not quite in a place where there's much to say about it yet so I'm gonna tinker with it a bit more this week and have that be my main focus for Friday's update, so for how I hope this gamedev writeup is satisfying.  I got a lot done on the gamedev front this week so let's have a look at that!

This week's focus has been on The Hugger.  I've been in a place lately where I'm trying to efficiently pick what to colorize to maximize as much colorization in our game as possible, since that's really helping it look good, and that has meant bouncing around from subject to subject a lot.  I got one level 90% colored so rather than spend time coloring the very tail end of it I'm working on enemies, like you get the idea with the front end so it's more efficient to shift focus to coloring a new asset than to color a colorized thing 100%.  Following that same logic, I wanted to get both the Hugger and the Runner up to a mostly-colorized state, which means doing a little of one and then a little of the other and then moving on to something else.  All the animation assets needed are technically -done-, but the aspect of adding color has been a huge effort to make the project feel less incomplete and look more like it's intended to be.  So this week was work on the Hugger, then I'll be fleshing out the Runner, and after that I'll be working towards bringing Alice up to color parity with Lizzie so there's another mostly-colored player character to show off.

Last dev update I had everyone's idle animations finished, so to flesh the Hugger out I focused on the animations we'll likely see the most of in actual gameplay- walking, hugging, squeezing and getting hit.  I just need to follow up with his normal attack animations, and I'm kinda not looking forward to tackling that animation set, since it opens up the need to review the attack effects for the other undead and add a new swing arc effect set for the Hugger, so I'm addressing that last.  Getting the Hugger's iconic hug done first felt much more important, and makes for a better feature to show off.  

This has been a very concise clip showing off all the little things I've colorized in this week.  The undead all have goofy walk cycles, which I imagine as like those AI models that learn locomotion in a physics engine in their own way, from scratch.  So you got the walk-up, there's that glimpse of the melee attack I'm putting off, and then you got The Hug.  The way the Hug is designed is the lunging attack is meant to have a built-in whiff animation for when the Hugger misses, and if he makes contact successfully at any point he just transitions right into The Squeezing, so there's no real need to define a separate whiff state, that's simply the continuation of the grab lunch animation.  

The squeezing itself is a feature we're pretty proud of pulling off.  The way the squeeze works is the Hugger has a base sprite animation for his body, and then there's a small Z-axis gap and then on an upper layer his arms are their own sprite.  I designed the arm squeeze to sell the illusion that the farther arm is wrapping around the player, with their sprite and the foreground arm covering up the space where you might be able to see there's no "forearm" to the back arm:

Looking back on it I guess the front arm does just entirely cover up the back arm, to help sell the illusion of depth.  

The player squeeze animations are designed with a very tight cinch point so they can fight right behind these arms and look like they're being held in place within the horizontal band of the top arm sprites:

Keeping the player as their own separate sprite sandwiched in between the Hugger's squeeze layers ends up being way more simple than trying to integrate all eight character/weapon variants into the Hugger's own sprite, and it also helps simplify accounting for color customization on the player sprites- their player entity just always stays its own colors so there's no need to feed that data into a hypothetical integrated Hugger sprite.  The end result is we're able to sell the illusion that a 3D character interaction is taking place with our 2D sprites.  It's cool to look at, but you'll probably still want to mash out of it.

While I was setting up the Hugger's getting-hit animations I also decided to knock out his Getting Crushed frames as well.  We have a few special hitstun animations for special attack cases, and one of those is Lizzie's big attack 6 overhead slam, which crushes enemies like a beer can.  Since Lizzie is the current active is-colored player character I decided to try it out on the Hugger to see how it looks in action.

He's a cute little guy!  There's some margin of error to account for the width of the move's hitbox compared to the width of the mop itself, but in action it parses well enough as Lizzie crushing a guy with her big mop slam.  Two can play at this crushing game!

That'll be it for this week.  As mentioned earlier I have a comic page in progress but I'd like to tune it up a bit more before posting it here so this week I'll be focusing on making progress on that.  Thanks for tuning in on a Sunday afternoon!  I'll be back again on Friday.