Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

Fit the blue alien sprite into the Animated Character group somehow #2505

Open
pushfoo opened this issue Jan 23, 2025 · 0 comments
Open

Fit the blue alien sprite into the Animated Character group somehow #2505

pushfoo opened this issue Jan 23, 2025 · 0 comments

Comments

@pushfoo
Copy link
Member

pushfoo commented Jan 23, 2025

TL;DR: The blue alien below's in a different folder with no fall state, larger textures, and fewer walk frames, but we can fix it

Image

As resource handle GitHub Folder
":resources:/images/alien/*" arcade/resources/assets/images/alien

Overview

What's Wrong? (Assets missing / mismatched scaling, but we can work-around for now)

  • Character art in our resources ("Alien") is annoyingly not-quite compatible with our other presets
  • It's making doc really annoying ahead of 3.0 release

How Bad Is It? (Annoying)

  • It's taking up vertical space and complicating things (special-casing, overstuffed sidebar, etc)
  • 3.0 is scheduled for this Saturday
  • The reporter is still annoyed enough to do a write-up

How Can We Fix it? (Move files + more doc, then add a fall state file if we have time to export SVGs)

  • Delete: No. (People seem to like the little blue alien)
  • Lazy "fix": Add a warning note and move it anyway as spaceAlienBlue*.png so it sorts below other characters
  • Low-Effort: Export the fall frame from the SVG sources, then warn people about the different walk cycle after the move
  • Higher effort: Generate frames for a perfect match from SVG sources (The extended platformer enemies pack)

Why Write All of This?

It's a set of notes for later reference for building some Arcade doc features.

What's Wrong?

The differences from other characters are:

  1. It uses different state names (front instead of idle)
  2. It lacks a fall frame which the other characters have
  3. It uses 2 frames for its walk cycle instead of 8
  4. It's in a different folder

How does it affect $AUDIENCE?

Audience Problem(s) caused
Arcade devs Taking up time ahead of 3.0 release (Camera, Rect, UI, etc need doc work)
Users "Why is it missing a fall state? On weird walk timing? On a different scale?" etc
Beginners "Sprite broken! Help!"

Example

The doc is the main concern imo:

  1. It looks like an animated character
  2. So why isn't it in the box with them?

Image

3 Plausible Solutions

I can't find any hi res exports in the .zip and don't want to mess with SVG right now ahead of more pressing 3.0 tasks, so here are some ideas:

Low-Effort Stop-Gap

  1. Move it to the Animated Characters resource folder anyway
  2. Add a note warning this one's a little different

Medium-Effort Solution

  1. Export the "hurt" frame from the SVG in matching resolution
  2. Rename alienBlue_front.png to alienBlue_idle.png
  3. Add a note about differing animation cycles + links

High-Effort

  1. Use SVG + puppet components in Kenny packs to create matching sets
  2. Ship a paper doll template in-box / on-site for users to draw their own art in
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant