Shockto Animations
December 3, 2013
These past couple weeks, I’ve been learning how to do some (simple) animations. Up to this point, I’d always just had discrete pictures – like you’re looking at panels of comics, say. Or I’ve just hand-drawn (erm, computer-drawn) the frames of a run animation. But for Shocktopus, I’ve wanted to do a bit more.
I found a great program called Spine, which is a fairly universal way to animate characters. You draw some bones, add some images onto those bones, set the key frames of the animation, and then you can export the animation to a bunch of different platforms. For me, of course, I mainly care that it plays well with Flash, which it does.
I used Spine to make the animations of the RoboYeti, who I showed off last time. But I’ve also used it for things like the intro video. So now it goes something like this:
It’s been fun pulling together some animations — and they are surprisingly easy to do (once you get over the learning curve of using new software). Just plug in the eight frames of a looping walk cycle, and the program does the rest for you.
And with that, the game suddenly feels a whole lot more polished. Like (gasp) a real game. Crazy!
-Andy
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