No real update this week, just alot of half-baked stuff and experiments that I’m not quite willing to show. One of them is shown below which is me trying out new rendering styles for portraits, Still trying to find a look I’m satisfied with using in the game.

Thanks for reading.

Finished putting in the brandish and run cycle for Jill in to the scene, and also added a shadow effect to the characters. The battle animation scene is pretty hacked together currently, there is a large amount of work needed to make the sequencing dynamic and robust, it’ll slowly come together like the map view did. Currently sort of just picking and choosing random things to do, mainly to procrastinate finalizing the enemy knight animation, which I mentioned before is probably by far the top priority.

Thanks for reading.

Below are the colored and cleaned versions of last weeks animations. Other than that, no updates =P.

A day late, but here’s the colored version of last week’s brandish post. Will be coloring the running animation and continuing to fix bugs this week.

Below is the finished draft of the previous lance brandish animation that needs to be lined and colored.

Almost all the bugs in the pathfinding algorithm have been ironed out and fixed, and it just needs alot of stress testing which is nice. This marks the beginning of being able to design and make maps without any functional bottlenecks blocking it. The attacking range has been fixed to work with all potential weapon types given few parameters.

Enemies can now search for enemy units properly, their path can be properly blocked by player units now.

Not much to show this week despite a lot of working getting done, just a lot of bug fixes with pathfinding and map nodes, and some keyframe designs for new animations. They’re all still in draft stages and will probably change alot so I’ll only be showing the key frames below. This is the brandish animation for the Character Jill with lances. There’s alot of in betweens for a complex twirl motion and I wasn’t able to get them all cleaned up for this post.

This week was a lot of bug fixing of the movement pathing and Enemy turn AI. I had left it in a only semi-functioning basic state, and there were alot of things to revise. In a previous post I had talked about how that long pathfinding was computationally heavy and would case the frames to lag, my hacky solution was to pre-calculate all possible paths at load time and then select between them, but I knew that would create weird problems in the future, especially when combined with bridge destruction mechanics. Alot of the fixes I implemented was just replacing pathfinding with a coroutine that does the calculation but returns control to the main thread in short enough periods where no frame lag occurs, This will need to be tested with different computers to see how performance might vary. Some of things I added were:
– Smooth camera panning on enemy
– enemies choosing priority targets to generate pathfinding on their turn
– tiles
There are a number of things I still have to implement, like how an enemy behaves if the path to its prioritized target is blocked, it should change targets and re-pathfind.

I also created a draft-sprite for a town, so I can begin some of the programming for how towns behave.

Thanks for reading.

Below are some enemy sketches. I redesigned the sword and shield knight, because the the old one was very impractical to create a running animation for. Going forward, I’ll have to take into consideration the practicality of any character design relative to animation, because indecision on the one knight design has led to a lot of technical headaches.

I was going to post a gif of the map-to-battle animation screen transition, but whilst doing-so discovered a few bugs that I need to fix. =/

Thanks for reading.

Below is a rough of an archer animation. It’s a pretty standard animation that will probably be ubiquitous for all archer-possible characters in terms of pose. The priority was to create an attack animation for the enemy knight character, but I’ve been postponing it because there is a very probably redesign of the enemy appearance and it would be sort of a waste to re-animate the entire thing. In the meantime, I’ve been reorganizing the way I use time, getting the animations done for one character was a pretty big milestone in developing an overall animation process. The thought right now is that I should create a number of rough designs like the one below, and let them sit for a bit so that I have time to consider redesigns, and not have to redo all the final animations. Also there’s alot of gameplay programming I can get back to as well to lengthen that time, and when I’m finally confident in a number of animation designs, set out a length of time to just do them all in a scheduled manner.

Thanks for reading.

I missed the usual sunday post because there just wasn’t any visible work to show. I went back to programming sections that I needed to work on and revise in several old areas that I thought could use improvements. One such example was turning the enemy turn phase into asynchronous calls for pathfinding calculation, instead of just calculating all possible paths at load time. I also played around with some new ui designs, like the circular health bars in the battle panels below. The size and green color make it difficult to see, but I’m going to try to tweak it and stay with the circular design. I wanted to take another break from animations and drawing, and balance my time out with some of the non-visual work.

Thanks for reading.