Potential Games

A peek at my commit log reveals a flurry of development regarding character avatar animations. I am in the process of improving the system to support fully animated sequences, which have only been partially handled in prior Alpha releases.

Read on for more details…

My avatar rendering system is effectively a sprite layer, coordinated with the underlying tiled world. In-world characters and creatures are driven by the avatar sprite engine. The sprites are made up of 2D frames of animation. Weapons (and other adornments) can be composited onto the animated avatars.

Previously, avatar figures supported only a limited form of animation. For simplicity, only NW and SW facing figures were drawn, flipping to provide Easterly directions, and foregoing cardinal directions entirely. Avatar hands had to remain at fixed points for weapon compositing, and the weapons could not themselves be animated.

For the next BetaAlpha release, I have integrated a fully animated character avatar, including walk and attack sequences. Weapons are composited and animated with characters. Creatures (and potential NPCs) also benefit from the new animation capability, but I’m focusing on player-characters for the moment.

My goal in enhancing the animation logic was to strike a balance between capability and ease of future graphic/gameplay integration. A primary decision was to composite weapons onto avatar animations, rather than include the weapons (and other adornments) with the character animations. This approach allows new weapons to be added without impact to the character avatars (and vice versa). Future avatars and animation sequences can also be incorporated with relative ease.

I’m very content with the end result of the new animation processing. In addition, finalization of the tileset and avatar specification paves the way for additional graphics to be incorporated into the game world. The next BetaAlpha release is near-at-hand.