DevLog #13

Wow, I have a headache, but at least the rain will help me go to sleep.

Cool, waited a comically long time for a new devlog as promised*

Development has been going pretty well! The last few months have been a combination of tightening up design decision (that'll be an ongoing thing), some new systems and breaking old ones, as well as making a ton of tools to make life easier. We've also been doing a lot of SPOILER so, hard to show and tell that stuff.

- One of the larger problems that we've had to tackle was something that would seem pretty basic: Importing animations.

Our game has a lot of them. I'd estimate that we'll probably hit close to a thousand by the end of it. In any case, depending on the purpose of the animation, there will likely be a few steps involved, which largely a lot of it was manual.

Time to talk ANIMATION PIPELINE!

- Concept Artist draws concepts, we vote, iterate and finalize those

- Keyframing (Usually either the same concept artist or the key animator), will take the concepts, put them to model, then building out the keys (or main points) of an animation

- Review: We do a review here to make sure that the actions in the keyframed animation are good, if changes need to be done, they are sent back

- IBs (In Betweens): As with most animations, inbetween add more motion and smoothness to an animation. Given our team size, usually the person who keyframed it will draw the IBs.

- Testing*: So depending on the purpose of the animation, this step might be done before or after Inbetweens. We might test keys before to make sure the action feels right (such as if it's an attack animation, or one dependent on physics).

- Clean Up: This includes cleaning up the line art and details, sometimes resolving some model issues in the rough animations, to make sure all animations for that character link up well, and so there aren't any "pops".

- Coloring: This is probably the most straight forward part. Referencing a character's model sheet, the animator will then color the cleaned up animation.

Okay, animation's done, what's next?

Well, now it has to make it's way into the game. 

From here, I'll talk about how some of our tooling improvements help out!

- Uploads: The team members have access to a shared network drive where they send in their assignments. For animations, a cleaned animation will be exported into individual frames. From there, we have a neat thing in the clouds that checks a specific folder every night for new animations, and runs them into a program called TexturePacker

- TexturePacking: TexturePacker takes the loose frames and creates a spritesheet or atlas for them, that can be imported into Unity (or whatever engine), along with some "instructions" that tell the engine how to rebuild those frames into an animation.

Once an animation is packed, it is then saved into a different location on the network drive, and another operation happens....

- GIT Push: When the animations are completed by TexturePacker, we also "stage" these items into the game's source control, where all of the game's assets, etc are stored. 

Every time The Thing in the Clouds is run, it will create a branch that we can open up, review, let Unity process, and then merge into the game project. This part requires some handholding and auditing, but it's a significant time save than uploading things into Unity manually. We're talking 20 minutes an animation vs 2 minutes at most.

- Animation Configuration: Largely the last part of this pipeline. Configuration is setting things up like hitboxes, animation events, movement some timing changes, etc.  

So yeah, that's quite a lot to do and manage a few hundred times!

Fortunately, we were able to get some of those automated things in place, as it bottlenecked production quite often!

We're iterating on background art!

One of those things that you don't quite realized until you have to do it is making sure that background and characters consistently contrast well, while making sure that they are "easy" to create consistently within the team, and be able to edit as needed.

One of the inspirations for Breeze obviously was making sure it feels like a playable cartoon show stylistically. We've taken the approach of making sure that character's pop well against the background while also making sure that the BGs still have charm. I'm hoping to share more of this in the near future, but there's a sneak peak above.

Character Things

For Cutscene and whatever else Purposes ~

We also started making control diagrams because convention demos taught us that gamer's aren't mind readers and text isn't always the best way to teach controls...

Anyway, that's it for now! Till Next time ~