Spine Mid Mortem (Patreon)

Unfortunately this is just going to be a text update, but I'll be going over some of the behind the scenes stuff from SMS and how the Spine experimentation has been going.

When I made SMS I essentially built my own hard coded and very bad skeleton rig in the game. It used points that I had to hard code for each sprite, combined with a bunch of weird trig to chain sprites together and specific locations and rotate them. It was really crude, but it worked and was all I had at the time, short of hand animating it which was never going to be viable.

The good news, Spine allows me to do that, very easily.  So if in the future I want to try to set up an SMS style game, with that level of animation, I can do so with some added flexibility, such as replacing models and stuff like that. Spine also has a lot of extra features, like meshes, which allow deformation and much finer control. This would mean I could have smoother animations that are much more flexible and organic.

However, the 'bad' news, Spine is very new to me and this is my first time properly rigging something, and painting weights and all that. So the level of deformation and refinement I'd like to do is still outside of my experience and technical knowledge. This has meant the last few weeks have been me literally redoing the mesh and weights and rigging 3 separate times. Each time, learning a bit more about how and what I can do. So it's been a very good learning experience, but it's resulted in not a lot of actual progress.

Ultimately, I have to just accept that it's not going to be perfect and gorgeous this first time around and the more I use Spine the more experience I'll have and the better I'll get. So I'll be finishing the basic rig tonight, I just need to finish re-redoing the balls and then I'll be able to start importing it into Gamemaker properly.

I will do my best to keep you all posted on anymore progress, but it's kind of just been a lot of tedious work that doesn't look like a lot on the surface. But hopefully it'll be worth it in the end.