Animations and Particles

This post can also be read on Itch.io

So i recently went through a whole deal with the animations for my game. The video mostly just shows off the process of start to finish of all i did.

I plan to break it down little by little

Animations

The video skips around how the animations looked overall, this is mostly because the process was hard to show. I had the jumping and dashing squash down, but one thing I hadn't ported yet was the walking animation from the Gamemaker project. Ultimately I decided to drop the walking animation to just go with a slight rotation instead, due to multiple days worth of fighting on and off trying to figure out how to get the walking to work. I would try having it in the base state, then moving it to its own animator node, I tried to make its own state machine around the animations. They all ultimately fell flat. I had already felt like I wasted enough time on this, and figured it was a good teaching moment instead, to understand that those methods in the future do not work, and to look into another method in the future games. I ended up still with something I like though, as i think the jumping squash looks really good and the dash is good aswell. The jump animation had one simple problem ill come back too later.

Particles

While i and a friend where looking over and working on the walk animation, I decided to also look into the particle system of Godot to break up the monotomy of the work. The system in place is really well done, im happy with the particles and how easy they where to create. I broke it down by what i wanted most, and really got it done in less than acouple hours. The dash started as just a line that came out of the player but that felt awkward so instead opted for a puff of smoke, I at first was unable to understand how to set the direction, but later found a simple fix that i just needed to add onto the dash code to get it. The puff now shoots out opposite of how you dash. The jump, land, and death particles where far quicker, with no real code needed, the only thing different is the death and land particles only move when they are needed to be emited.

Velocity caps

Previously the speed coming out of the dash was so fast that it would shoot you miles into the air, and vice versa the fall speed was uncapped so a long fall the animation would cause your sprite to stretch and twist unusually. these where easy fixes obviously, just adding a simple if statement telling it to change the velocity if its abover/below a certain value.

Love Every Trans Woman You Meet Before It's Too Late.