The Animation Roadblock

This is a really hard thing to explain so bare with me here ok?? ok?? tha nks

When I started working on Rainshade, it was a much simpler, smaller game, with very basic mechanics. The character customization system I had set up was rather easy to implement, because the player was only meant to have a handful of animations. With parrying, throwing, pushing, and all sorts of other things being added, things quickly grew out of hand, and the player's sprite sheet became absolutely massive.

The emphasis here is on sheet. Singular. For customization purposes, things were coded in such a way that all the poses for each customization option needed to be on a single sheet. If you know anything about UVs, the way it worked is it automatically took the UVs of the "template" sprite (the one I actually animate with), and via shaders, replace it with the chosen custom character sheet. But because it ONLY reads the UVs, using template sprites from a different sprite sheet didn't do anything different.

(Here's a visualization of how it works, basically)

The big trouble here is every time I needed to add a sprite, I either needed to replace one of the existing ones, or add a new line to the sheet — and this was consistently a complete nightmare, as it would break every single customization option until its respective sheet was updated. And, of course, it'd made a very large image even bigger.

This, however, was solved! Somehow? Somehow this happened what?????? It's still considerably less convenient than character customization with models, but I managed to set up a script that automatically adjusts how the shader handles sprites based on a few parameters, even disabling customization entirely in specific circumstances (demonstrated by the player temporarily turning into Verla above). This is a godsend for animations that are used like once or twice, such as in cutscenes.

This was on par with the auto-tile issue in how much it was snagging development, and it's kind of hard to overstate why!!

Oh yeah it was nigh-impossible for your custom character to receive a hug from Verla for like 1000 reasons and now it's EASY............. that's what's important thanks