MA Indie Game Dev Initial Concept
A little information behind my idea – Ralphy gets animated..?
I have always enjoyed watching animation with characters that look soft, beautiful scenery with an imaginative storyline, and a theme tune that captures the emotion.
One of my biggest favourites when I was little, was The Snowman, specifically because of the emotion it creates for the viewer, with no text, only sound effects, and one powerful ballad.
With this as a starting point, I began thinking about converting my characters from my story books, and animating them. I am very excited/ nervous about the start of this process, but I am keeping an open mind for the journey a head.
The character I shall work with : Ralphy
My focus is on making Ralphy move in Unity, after watching Jason Weimann, on his Youtube channel, I am intending for my first basic animation, to look something like the below.
The reason this part is key to my development, is to show the steps I began with. I have never done this before.
Unity – the experience…
When adding your own character – it must be as PNG file.
After adding Ralphy in 5 frames, the out come was him standing, bending, moving his arms and head. But in one place. This is not what I intended, it made me laugh due to fact of the timing…
I have made endless notes on Unity…here below is the result and my directions, that I have followed along the way.
Visual Studio
I am only able to put a screen shot of Ralphy’s original position, due to experimenting with C sharp script using Visual Studio one of Unity’s code editor’s, Ralphy didn’t even move on the spot!? (Explanation below)
However thanks to my friend Patricio, he guided me, showed me where I went wrong.
I realised I had watched too many Youtube videos, explaining about coding to create a URL, how to put a Unity animation onto a WordPress site, many other little problems arose, and Ralphy not moving at all, was just one.
Below is the mini youtube tutorial, showing you how to create a URL link, this is what I was following, but hadn’t taken into consideration, what I actually needed to do before.**
This created a big error with the script. The message below kept popping up.
“Script must derive from MonoBehaviour”
**Patricio explained about creating a package in Unity, whereby, I would need to group all my assets together, that was to be in my animation first, then to export the file. I hadn’t done this, I had just tried to add script to an animation, and send to my WordPress, when it wasn’t even exported as the correct file type. Plus I had only sent him two frames of the walking position, which didn’t help. I began researching 2D animation principles on LinkedIn.
(I knew something was not working correctly, as after the C sharp script was added, Ralphy didn’t even move or wiggle on the spot.)
So once I removed the script (first image above), the following step was exporting it as a package.
Following the Kanban method ; one step at a time: The Journey so far…
- Set up 2D scene – I had created a simple background, saved as a PNG, ready and uploaded to Blender as you can see from the second image above. Plus I added the same background to Unity, to get a better understanding of how these systems work, (third image above.)
- Completed 2 and half hours – LinkedIn Learning – 2D Animation Principles, with Animator Dermot, who works for Disney and Don Bluth. He demonstrated a range of fantastic examples, and revealed how to add movement in walks, running, bouncing, stretching, volume and lots more. So detailed, my aim was to concentrate on the timing element, to gain some knowledge of 24 FPS, compared to the 30 FPS (frames per second ).
Below is how Ralphy looked, when first placed into Unity.
The animation above is what Patricio put together for me…
Conclusion so far…
I checked my Unity layout again…my timeline, and animation tab, was not available to view.
I thought my notes were correct on how to bring individual PNG files of my character in position to the hierarchy side column, and how to drag a background scene in. But obviously the one key step after, was to use the timeline, then add key frames and make sure to rewatch how the animation ran. Looking back, when writing notes from Jason Weimann Youtube, I remember him saying, your animation tab should now have popped up somewhere, and mine hadn’t.
I wish I had never tried to add script, I should have stopped when these screens didn’t appear, I had assumed they had “popped up” somewhere where I couldn’t see them. I shall never assume from now on, lesson learnt.
I am now paying special attention to doing the whole process again from scratch, determined to get this right, especially after seeing how just a few character PNGs and a background can look.
I will not dabble with any kind of coding yet, as it really set me back, which made me start to doubt my ability of creating any animation on Unity, I was lucky Patricio was there to help me in this situation, otherwise I may still be stuck at this point.
Next step – to start up another Unity project, from the beginning – aim to move my previous character, but with more frames, on one of my 2D backgrounds.
The Ultimate Goal…
- Objective: to make Ralphy move!
- Create an interactive story.
- Final artefact to be an app, or an animation…?
RALPHY GETS ANIMATED..? 