EXCELLENT NEWS (regarding shantae animation)

I haven't made progress on it in a while HOWEVER! I have made a breakthrough!

The predicament of figuring out how to get one of two animations to play in the same player based on user input had me stumped. On one end, I figured I could do it in Unity, html5, or WebGL, but those formats are 100% foreign to me (save for unity... slightly) and wouldn't work on Newgrounds due to the animation not being a game.

I'd maybe look to Unity if I couldn't find something else.

If I had been doing the animation in Flash, I would've just made everything  as .swf animations. An SWF movie still allows for user interactivity.

Toon Boom has the option to export to SWF, however it was a bit buggy in the past, leading to errors in frames. I've managed to lock down those errors and export my animations as SWF files.

This means I can import them into Flash. They look like this:

It's not organized at all--every single part is on the same layer, and it's 100% in ones. But otherwise it looks IDENTICAL to the native TB animation.

This means I can plan out the scenes and audio cues just like I would with a normal flash game--which mind you I HAVE made a few small ones before. Programming wise, compiling the movie would just require:

• A preloader
• Scene selection
• Audio control (I'll need to phone in help for that one but everything else I have 100% down)

THE BIG THING HOWEVER! This opens the door to MANY things should I desire to make them. Once again I can do interactive animations and secrets, only now made with the juicy goodness of Toon Boom instead of just flash. The Shantae animation in particular will allow me to stage how the animation progresses (I may opt to make pacing less plot driven and more user driven, where you get to decide when to advance the scenes, and each scene has different escalations. This would mean smaller / fewer transitions, but more in each scene. Though I could maybe put an autoplay in as well.)

So yeah. I will be back to actually animating for it soon, though I need to decide now what specifically I want to do. (If you guys have thoughts on what you would wanna see more--a more story-like pacing, or more direct control over the scene pacing--post your thoughts in the comments.)

If I ever make a sequel to the Curly Brace hypno thing, you can bet I'd take advantage of interactivity.