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We're creating Pizza Hot!, a 2D adult video game.

March 09, 2022 11:18 pm

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This content was created for artistic and entertainment purposes FOR ADULTS ONLY and may include pictures and materials that some viewers may find offensive. If you are under the age of 18, if such material offends you or if it is illegal to view such material in your community please exit the page IMMEDIATELY. All depicted characters are fictional. No live victims were produced during this content creation and no harm was imposed upon any live creature. All characters depicted in sexual situations are 18 years of age or older and of the age of consent, even if it looks otherwise. Acts depicted are all consensual.

Animation-related wall of text... ^_^

I'm gonna stop working and write a bit about progress. Because in a couple of hours I'll only want to hit the sack.

Okay, if you're on Discord nowadays, maybe you've read me ranting about animation. Technical animation work, to be more specific. If you're curious about it, this is going to be interesting.

In Spine, which is the skeletal animation software I use, you can do a lot of things... but translate what you see in the editor to Unity...? That's not necessarily trivial.

Transitions in particular are a tough cookie. If you decide not to go the easy path and don't care about them, all animations you do will snap into frame 0 of the next one. Ugly and cheap.

But if you do, and that's my case, then you have a lot more to worry about when implementing them in the game. Sure it looks fantastic, but the added price is there.

Now, this wouldn't be a big problem if I was using just one track to play the animations... but I'm a crazy motherfucker and that's not what I'm doing. I'm using more than twelve tracks in just one model. They go something like this...:

Boobs (this includes breathing)
Hair (with its gravity)
Idling (subtle torso+head+arms motion)
Main (posing)
Secondary (specific actions with an arm, head, whatever)
Tertiary (extra actions, usually with the other arm)
Carry (for things like holding a suitcase, a bag...)
Six expression tracks (eye, mouth, eyebrow... they're all separated)
LookAt (makes them look at each other, very complex implementation)

And the cut-in have their own tracks. In other words, a lot more than you see happens in the background.

I have my reasons for dividing animations like this. Mainly that most of them would repeat in single-track animations, and copy+pasting keys is awful work and I'd need to do that for every single animation that includes them, if I even want to modify, let's say the breathing motion. Playing it on another track is way more manageable.

Also, let's say you want two animations to loop at a different pace. The breathing, for example. If I have a main action consisting of Jenny getting drilled at top speed, like three times the normal pace, should her breathing motion be seen also at 3x speed?

Well, the answer is no. Then the problem you'd have with just one track is how you fit the normal, maybe a bit faster breathing, with three thrusts and also their secondary motion (boobs, hair reactions) in the number of frames you've decided the whole thing should run for.

On the other hand, if you just play the breathing on another track, you leave it playing there and forget about it. You focus on the main action and decide later at what speed you want to play each of them.

If you don't do that, you'd end up with hundreds, if not thousands of animations for not so many scenes.

That said... there's one problem with this approach of segmenting body parts and their motion. The internal maths Spine Unity runtimes do to magically know which animation keys should be played and when, and which should be overwritten, replaced, or added.

Let's say you want your breathing animation, but you also want to adjust the angle of her torso in a specific scene. How to have both things, instead of one overwriting the other? Well, there's one way, but it's not automatic.

It's really complex if you don't know exactly how everything is applied and in what order, what are the exceptions, and how you can make your own depending on what you want to achieve.

So, the last three days have been spent experimenting with all that. I'd wish I could tell you I already knew the last secret of Spine, but hell no. I needed to bang my head against problems I didn't encounter until now.

When I made LOK Rebirth I "only" had five tracks, most of them irrelevant to the main action. The swinging tail, that silly idle animation, three expression tracks, and then the main track where everything happened. And yes, everything was copy+pasted.

Pizza Hot is nothing like that, at many, many levels. There are sections of the engine that are scary in their own right.

Anyway, all that said, I can declare these three days of experiments ended. The result is that I have now a better animation logic, and content creation can continue.

And regarding that, all these experiments were necessary just because I started to make full-fledged sex scenes... but not for Pizza Hot, but the other game, which you may know it'll be way crazier regarding sex progression.

I... think you might like it, even if you prefer slow corruption because I went with the parody style all-in, and the premise looks like it's taken from Japanese porn. xD

You'll see. As for Pizza Hot, don't worry that I'm spending time with the other game. It'll be just a scene, but all this technical work was necessary to make it in the first place, and it'll benefit Pizza Hot's development as well.

Thanks!

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