Spryke - hardcore new-school platformer

Quote from Outcast

This is a little embarrassing but how do one check how much RAM ones game takes up?

Task Manager, you can also monitor the memory usage from Fusion's debugger, but it ain't so reliable

Quote from Volnaiskra

Thanks! I love nothing more than talking about my workflows, so your wish is my command X)

I use Toon Boom Harmony for animation. It's expensive, but fantastic. It has the best vector tools of any program I've used: powerful, but much more fluid than Illustrator or Photoshop, in a way that encourages natural freehand drawing and sketching.

In addition to a frame-based timeline, it uses a node system, which can seem overwhelming at first but you quickly learn to love it because of how powerful and flexible it is. You use it to rig up your characters in way that lets the various parts interact with each other in lots of useful ways, in complex ways that wouldn't be possible with a top-to-bottom layer-based system alone. This enemy has hundreds of nodes. Even just the pink jelly 'bullet' has a lot:

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It might look like a bird's nest of cables and rectangles, but it actually means that everything is kept super modular and non-destructive, which ultimately makes life easier.

This type of workflow is well suited to my skillset. I'm not a particularly gifted illustrator, so I can't just throw down some art and have it look amazing on the strength of the drawing alone. But where I shine is with my use of complexity and intricacy, and when I can experiment and iterate to test ideas and tweak them as I go. Toon Boom Harmony is great at this. I've set up my MFA to automatically import new PNGs for all key assets when it runs, so I can iterate frequently and test in-game almost instantly.

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So have a look at the bullet in the below GIF. Each of the bullet's blue tendrils has its own nodes (those of one tendril are shown in the pink box, top-right). The light blue node is the actual tendril drawing. The topmost Peg node can control the movement of this drawing, as can the three bright green Bone nodes. Rotating one bone affects the others bones (like a shoulder > elbow > wrist hierarchy).

This tendril's nodes are themselves connected to the pink jelly's nodes elsewhere, which allows the tendril to move up and down in sync with the jelly, which you can see in the GIF.

You animate these movements on a timeline (bottom) using keyframes and automatic tweening. And you can fine-tune the easing with bezier curves (top-left).

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You can include various effects and deformers as part of the node network. In the following GIF I isolate some of the nodes that were used to create the explosion effect:

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Here's an example of a neat node called the Two-Point-Constraint. With it, you can place 2 simple pegs on a drawing, then as you move the pegs it automatically applies squash, stretch, and rotation to the drawing. Notice how each cheek can be independently squashed and stretched just by dragging a peg around. Also notice how the mouth has its own Two-Point-Constraint node which is informed by the bottom pegs of each cheek. So as you move one of the cheeks' pegs, not only does the cheek squash and stretch, but the mouth moves with it and squashes and stretches itself.

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Here's my PokerEel rig, which uses a lot of deformers. Notice how when I deform the body, the flipper, frill and head all adjust accordingly. And notice that masks are applied in such a way that the bottom teeth are hidden by the upper jaw, while the upper teeth are hidden by the lower jaw

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Apropos FX, I highly recommend the book Elemental Magic Volume 2 by Joseph Gilland. It's a great (non-technical) explainer of how things like splashes, waves, fire, and explosions work and how to animate them, by a real expert in the field.

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Wow - that's a really great overview of everything. Thanks for sharing! I dabbled with a Toon Boon demo around 2012-ish but I'm a terrible illustrator and never progressed with it. I honestly had no idea it was that capable of a software.

Quote from Volnaiskra

This week I made some Puffworms. These little guys react to Spryke's movements, and give her a little puff to make her jump higher.

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They're procedurally generated. All I need to do is place pairs of these Edge objects in my level editor wherever I want the Puffworms to spawn. The engine will then generate the worms itself: some behind Spryke, some in front. It will adapt their positioning and angle to any slopes, will choose from 3 pre-baked animations, and will randomise things like size, animation speed, and how close each worm must to be to Spryke before it reacts.

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Very cool! Does that have a lot of storage and memory overhead for all the animations you are using, or are you loading those externally now?

Quote from Volnaiskra

Things are coming along. gameplay is very solid, 3 worlds are designed, and Spryke is fully animated. I'm about to spruce up my website with a bunch of new animated GIFs.

If you have a minute, please take this survey to let me know which GIFs you think are the best!

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"G"
Shows the speed, Gameplay and Graphics in one.

Nice, very cool 😎

Hey Vol, it's been a long time since I checked in. Your recent images look great. It looks like you've really honed your skills in the years since I've seen the project, and they were high before. The interaction with those puffworms is charming and full of life. I hope development continues to go well and look forward to seeing more.

"C" is for me the best one, it' s easy to see Spryke, and shows speed, actions, other "creatures" and the really nice parallax effect with diverses backgrounds.

I must admit, really impressive work , Volnaiskra ! If I only had 1% of your graphic-talent !!!

The puffworms are sooo sweet, they really seems to be alive !

I think you are on the right path to make a formidable game - keep on Volnaiskra !

Best regards,

Sergio

How do you keep motivated to keep working on Spryke after so many years, Vol? How do you defeat the 'doubt demons' (if there are any)?

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Reminds me of your game. How's Spryke doing?

One word: impressive 😀