Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
So, it is good to add the unexpected touch to the animation frame sometimes. It can
be done by replacing an ordinary frame with one differing frame that has some small
unique detail. There can be several extra frames; the game would choose them ran-
domly.
It is good to animate characters in Adobe Flash and then to export the result as
separate still images, finally collecting them into one Adobe Illustrator document and
exporting it as an animation sheet. It is worth mentioning about a very interesting
tool for creating smooth and natural character animation called Spine (
ht-
tp://esotericsoftware.com/
)
. Its general advantage is that it is a 2D skeletal system
with various fragments of a character (head, body, legs, feet, and so on) attached.
Positions of bones and their angles are calculated in real time and interpolations are
very smooth and correlated with the frame rate; therefore, the motion is very smooth.
Moreover, because animation is not tied to strictly defined frames, the system is
very flexible; this means that some combination of motions can be easily introduced
without redrawing a full sequence of frames. For example, by default in traditional
frame-by-frame animation, a character running and the same character running and
shooting are two separate sequences, which increases consumption of memory re-
sources and makes animation exporting a bit complex. A skeletal animation has no
such complications; various gestures of the character can be combined more easily
with minimum memory costs. Of course, this is possible only if a game did not use
a raster output of Spine in the form of video files or sprites, but used binary data of
virtual bone positions and keyframes stored in special documents instead.
Differentspecialeffectsarebasedonanimationtoo.Forexample,smokecanbecre-
ated by using a translucent and blurry circle being duplicated around the screen; the
opacity of each circle should be reduced softly, but their sizes should be increased.
