For weeks now, I've been days away from completing a key upgrade in Guilds of Gods. I keep touching new things, expanding the patch, and getting caught up in making something cool.
Finally, I can safely say, we are days away... but for real this time!
New character & NPC designs
The characters were due from an upgrade. Our community has been excited with how things are going and contributed a lot of art to the game. In particular, two users, Francisco and Boool, have both really helped out this patch. Francisco has recreated the player sprites, including remaking every single piece of clothing or armor in the game. Boool gave us the new goblin and orc sprites, re-envisioning the NPCs.
These community changes, along with other changes, such as updated chickens, rats and crabs, makes for a joyful graphical improvement.
Animations
Animations were also in need of some TLC (Tender love and Carson). Before, the animations were all hand-coded, which both made creating animation a slow process, while also limiting us in what we can do, and making it hard to bring in a quality animator. We could update the engine, but it felt like we were putting in too much work for what we were trying to accomplish.
Instead, I wrote a bridge between PIXIJS (our rendering engine) and a 3rd party tool, Spriter. Spriter makes bone animations easy through a convenient interface. Every player and NPC animaton in the game was redone, now with proper bone animations. We are now in a position to bring in an animator who can create amazing animations for us.
Video of animations being shown off
Reflection
Overall, it's been a really fun couple weeks. Even if its taken a few days longer than intended. I think this was a really needed update. We now have all the pieces needed to offer full character customization. That is the next feature I will be working on, coming out next patch