flannaganthered

Red's Wrap-Up (August 2022)

Added 2022-09-01 08:19:15 +0000 UTC

Hi everyone, took a little impromptu break there the later half of July after releasing the final version of Jessie x Arbok, but we're back to it now and this month's wrap-up is XXL!

Just in case you might have missed it, here's the post for JxA.

Speaking of which, just a heads up that the online web version will be available up on Newgrounds soon. A few of you have asked about Mac builds, but with my limited resources this is the best I can do for now.

Some of you who follow me on twitter (@FlannaganTheRed) might have seen some new animations this month:

I've been wanting to animate more of other artists' work for a while now, both to challenge myself and to practice the following:

Cutting apart existing illustrations and preparing them for animation.
Creating brand new rigs.
Animating art I'm not as attached to.

That last point is actually more important than it seems, because I've noticed that when I animate my own drawings, I'm much more aware and critical of mistakes and tend to spend more time going back to fix them instead of leaving them alone and moving on.

Anyway. The original illustration is by RizDraws, and here's a link that has HD videos of all the animations I did with it.

I've got another one in the works (also featuring art by RizDraws), that I'm trying to record the process of from start to finish for anyone who's interested to see how it's done. Shooting for it to be showable by the end of the month, but we'll see.

My top priority in August was properly getting back into working on Pod's New Program! August's work isn't particularly exciting, but I do have some visuals to share.

As you can see, I've been working on revising the dialogue system. With the old version, I could only set font styles per line, and it was clunky and difficult to add new styles. With the new version, I can define font styles per word or even per character, and it supports all the style definitions of HTML5. Also, the system is now capable of premapping the text box to prevent live word wrapping (where the word currently being revealed jumps to the next line as it becomes to big to fit on the previous line). A small detail, but makes a big difference in readability and just generally looks more polished. This series of gifs shows some in-progress stages before I got it completely working. There's still a few more things that need to be done to get it fully implemented (right now it only works on one scene), but it's almost there.