Animation Updates


To improve the look and feel of the truck I was able to re-jig the animation system to overlay a squash and stretch bounce to the truck as it moves as well as a small acceleration factor which I think works well. 

I also, added some extra idle poses for the bystanders so that they face the direction the finish in, this could also be used to improve the walk cycles so that the left/right motion actually looks like it changes. I am pretty happy with the updated look of the animations,  and have decided that for the style we picked that I don't want to increase the animation frame count too much.

I have also implemented an improved interface and event listener pattern behind the scenes to reduce the degree of hard coding in the scripts which should make future updates easier. 

Working with the Sprite Library system:

It turns out that while the sprite library feature in Unity could be really handy, its current implementation has been really buggy and a bit limited in scope. Overriding images in a library is really finnicky and the GUI for selected items is very broken. Being able to put libraries as stored components in libraries would be really helpful when building sprite animations sets with visual customisation as well as a defined move set. Because I have to build a separate library for either each visual option or each move option which is a lot of unnecessary work, particularly with the GUI being bugged. 

It also turns out that the animation system hashes the layer and category fields from a library together for each animation, so the animation code for when you swap out the category and keep the layer the same changes. Which I could see causing issues with generalisation in the future.

On the positive side, the use of at least some level of generalisation when defining sprite sets can massively reduce the number of animation clips and animator override controllers that I previously needed to make for each new sprite component. Instead I can create a single set of animations and a controller and just change the sprite library on each object to change the animations which is great.

Get Truck-Kun: A godess' Blessing to an Isekai Protagonist

Download NowName your own price

Leave a comment

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.