Hero polishing and animation

Polishing

I worked a bit more on Major Tom's design. I added a bit of light and shadows, to make it look less flat, and I added small details to the helmet. Oh ! and also, color to the logo on the shoulder ! Now the hero is 99% black and white, not 100%.

Here is a before/after pictures :

I am pretty sure I'll stick to it. Drawing is definitely a pain for me. I think I gave my best shot on this.

Animation

So now I am happy with my hero, what do I do with him ?

I chop him into parts ! Just like Dexter would do !

Oh noooooo ! Major Tom has been chopped !

Why did I do that ???

To create an animation, basically, there are 2 methods :

1. You draw every single frame. You can do anything you can imagine. The only limit is your drawing skill
2. You draw once, every body parts, and you use a software to move them, as if your character was a puppet.

When you are like me, and you are not skilled in drawing, the second method is definitely the best. You'll save A LOT of time and frustration.

Therefore, I put all these body parts in the amazing software Spriter Pro.

With this tool, you just drag and drops the body parts of your character in the main window. Once you placed them, you can draw "Bones", basically one bone for each part of the body you want to move, and you assign a body part to every bone. All that remains to do is move the limbs of your puppet, and the Spriter will interpolate the whole motion, it very intuitive and ridiculously easy. Just look the first of them tutorial videos, in 7 minutes you'll be able to do very cool animations !

The screen looks like that :

Then all you need to do is export your animation. You can export it in gif, or you can export the .png files. That's what we'll do, as libGDX needs a spritesheet with all the animations steps to create the in-game animation.

Here is the idle animation of Major Tom, floating in space. In-game, the animation will be slower.

I also created an animation that will be called Fly Animation, that will be displayed when Major Tom activates his jet pack.

Finally, I exported 11 png for the Fly Animation and 20 png for the Idle Animation, and packed them with the libGDX Texture Packer, to obtain this animation spritesheet :

The names of the different png are VERY important. All the png of a single animation must have the same name, followed by a number. For example, for the Idle animation I have Tom_Idle_000, Tom_Idle_001, Tom_Idle_002, ..., Tom_Idle_019. And in the libGDX code, to create the animation, I'll only refer to the name "Tom_Idle", and libGDX will be able to get all the pictures and put them in order.

We'll see the code in the next devlog !