No Game Engine Game Dev: Word Sleuth 053: Finished sprite animation and starting to flail at art

Streamed on 2024-09-23 (https://www.twitch.tv/thediscouragerofhesitancy)

Game Engines are for sissies!

Sprite animation sequences are a thing we implemented last week, but they are just a bit clunky to use for the most common cases: You have to know in the using code how many frames the animation is and what the UV names are. The information is all known at the time the Asset Pipeline runs, so we can package that information up to make setting up a Sprite animation a single operation. I added to the Asset pipeline whether to treat an animation as a loop and to read in the Frames per second. Then I laid out all the information for a named sprite animation in arrays that I added an enumeration so I can access the information by name. With all of that in the Asset Pipeline, the only thing left to do was to add the convenience method to Sprite. With only a bit of tweaking it worked great. Now animations can be setup in a single call with just the name of the Sprite animation.

And that is the end of active software development. Everything from now on will be polishing work. To start with, I need new art. The layout of the scene (which depends on the art) has to be finalized before I can fine tune any animations or transitions. And this is where I am a gross novice. We floundered about in Blender for a while before I decided that the Perspective and Orthographic views weren't fit for purpose. Then I dug up some isometric grid paper to sketch things out on. That was better, and I think that is the right track. But if we lay out one of the UI components and the aspect ratio is incorrect later, it will warp the component, so I have to know before I draw too much what the aspect ratio is for each component. I went back to Gimp and started laying out elements with margins, spacings and figuring out how much room each element needs. With that information I should be able to scratch together something real quick to test the new art/layout/perspective.