Yeah Baby, we've got it!

So how do you know when your animations "capture the physical, exhilarating seconds of combat resolution"? Well, we've been cruising right along with our game, My Bogle. Things are falling into place at an almost alarming pace. Torque Game Builder rocks! I've been incorporating new animations into the game as fast as we can get them spit out from Toon Boom (is anyone else out there using this for their 2D projects?), and it's been great fun watching the character interactions on screen become more and more dynamic. We're finishing up two of the characters now, and are working on their final animations - the death sequence. This is really where we want to capture the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Remember the moment in Battle Chess when the pawn takes the knight. The animation is about to roll. You know what's coming, right? You've seen it before, but there was still an emotional pay off, that not only captured the essence of taking an opponent's piece while playing chess but it took it up a notch. Now imagine that you don't know what's going to happen when you have your character swing at its opponent. Will it connect, will it hit... will it kill? And when you see that opponent's melodramatic death sequence, it makes it all that much more rewarding. We've got the perfect plan, we've got a great game, we just need to execute on it with a perfect animation sequence to hook the player so that they want to do it again and again.

We know how much is riding on it, and so I've been running over the animation. Over and over. Checking to make sure it's the most rewarding animation we can create without it being too "annoying". Then all of the sudden I realized that I had spent a significant amount of time (I don't even want to think about how long) clicking the play button over and over again but I was no longer clicking it to find flaws, to find ways to improve it. I was clicking because it was ... fun? Yes. But, more than that. It was doing it's job perfectly! Well, I didn't need to click play anymore, now did I? So I dragged myself away, thinking - "We've got it!" - and started trying to get some other work done. 30 seconds later, I found myself clicking the button again, just to see it one more time. Okay, 3 times. Alright. Now back to work. But I kept feeling the overwhelming need to click play just one more time. I just ... wanted to click it. Acknowledging that you have a problem is the first step to recovery. :)

Yeah... we've got it!

I'd love to share it, but you'll just have to wait a wee bit longer. The beta will be on us before we know it. Anyway, if you want to see what we've been doing with Toon Boom, you can catch Jonathan's blog post about it here. It's got pretty pictures!

-Andrew
theoreticalgames.com