Blog Post 4 - Ben Daniels

 Completed:

• In the past three weeks, I completed numerous essential tasks. 
• Polished up Terrario abilities: https://trello.com/c/OkDFc3Zm
• New sprite for the q animation
• Uppercut (shift) now actually looks and functions as an uppercut
• combo is effective and satisfying as a result

• Third character (Gloopy) - most essential coding: https://trello.com/c/dK5T7DxQ
• Ability one: drops an ink cloud, slowing enemies
• Ability two: surrounds Gloopy in an ink shield, quickly slowing down the player and heavily reducing the knockback they take momentarily
• Ability three: a spin/float up attack (Ethan is still working on this one)
• Animations framework: https://trello.com/c/jTsldJ9E
• Due to some fundamental issues with the finite state machine I put on Flamie and some general brain atrophy related to animations, I decided to completely finish the animations for the third character, Gloopy, due to the amount of art material available. As a result of this, any following systems will be implemented on Gloopy only, but will function perfectly fine on any other character.
• File system
• each animation put into a unique file containing their finished animation
• animations automatically sent to the animator controller

Example of file system

• Finite State Machine
• Stores the current state of the character/player inside of an enumerator with a numeric value assigned to each one
• checks within the update function to constantly update the state of the player 

• Animator controller 
• Connects animations with transitions, which are conditional based on the current state of the player
• allows easy transition between animations 
• stupidly complicated-looking in the interface, but not too hard to follow 

D:

• this framework was definitely my best yet, fortunately, and I will be able to simply copy-paste things into other scripts to create animations for other characters
• A LOT of art: https://trello.com/c/XHFIan5I
• basically the title, tons of frames of animation for Gloopy, the third character
• this also includes the basic sprite for the character (in my opinion, it's my best one): https://trello.com/c/CcEz9zBK

From top to bottom: frame of ability three, last frame of punch animation, jump animation, ink shield animation

Next two weeks:

• Continue the animation grind
• Two more, smaller animations for Gloopy (the punch upwards and downwards): https://trello.com/c/XHFIan5I (bottom two items)
• Terrario will be the next character I do animations for
• This will consist of making tons of art for idle, running, ability animations, punching animations, etc., all for Terrario: https://trello.com/c/xhRHWVNs
• Additionally, I will copy my framework into Terrario so everything fits together: https://trello.com/c/64UIpgpl
• I hope to finish all of the Terrario animations in the next two weeks