5/15/2023 0 Comments Aseprite tpb![]() Today I thought I would take some time to break down some of the work that goes into making a single frame of Animal Well look the way it does. What lies ahead will be a relatively brief and high-level tour-each of the features shown could have a blog post of its own-but nevertheless I think a peek under the hood will prove interesting. To start, Animal Well is rendered in many different layers that all get composited together in fairly complicated ways. Here you can get a glimpse at some of those layers, and how they are used together to render lighting, before producing the final image. This shot is from early in the game where you can use firecrackers to banish a pursuing ghost. We can break it down to see some of the rendering steps involved. Just about any variable in my engine can be edited via a midi controller I have hooked up to my computer. It makes the process of fine-tuning gameplay variables much faster (and also more fun!) Using a midi controller I can literally dial in the settings. I use a modified version of the popular program Aseprite to draw and animate sprites. ![]() ![]() I can make changes in Aseprite, which outputs a custom binary animation format, and then the engine will instantly reload it while the game is running. In the same way that articulating exactly how Animal Well looks different from other pixel art games can be difficult, it’s equally challenging to say why it feels good to play. After all, the controls are extremely simple: move left and right, jump, and use items. So what’s different about how Animal Well does it compared to every other game in the history of gamekind? It all comes down to input latency.Ĭreating an entirely new custom engine is a lot of work, which may be why not many people do it. There is no shortage of existing off-the-shelf engines, from Unreal to Unity to GameMaker and more. Games made with off the shelf engines sit on top of the engine layer, which acts as a buffer between the game and the CPU and GPU. With Animal Well, as soon as the player so much as touches the control, the game code can tell the GPU immediately and directly what to do, meaning that the game can render using your input from the same frame, without any buffering. The pathway from brain → fingers → controller → game → display becomes nearly instantaneous. Of course no one notices this on a conscious level. Please note that most options use magic colors, selected colors will be restored after closing the Magic Pencil dialog window or selecting the Regular option. The game just starts to feel like an extension of your mind, and the controller just seems to disappear.
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