Erikari wrote
Aww that is so romantic <3
Good luck guys! 😃
We're a romantic bunch! 😃
The lip sync is off because...well, there isn't one, really. It was a bit of a quickie just for beta test purposes. The usual indie problem of juggling priorities and such. Glad you like it overall.
Regarding the unusual usage of Spine, it's a bit of a tough one because frankly it's hard to tell what are all the weird ways that people might use Spine, and most of that stuff is "behind the curtains" that's hard to tell just by playing someone's game.
For me personally the biggest change from various previous projects was how Spine allows one to unburden programmers when it comes to UI. They usually really hate tinkering with it and that's quite understandable, what with all the placement hassle, tweaking and such. And then you want to "this interface element to animate liiiike thiiiis" and you want different kinds of animations - one for when the element first appears and then a loop animation that follows that and at that point poor guy is either screaming like bat out of hell or tyranically announcing that's "not possible" or "maybe after launch" and we all know how that usually pans out.
With Spine an annoying nitpicky artist doesnt have to be a bottleneck. Most of the ui elements have 3 anims - Intro, Loop and third one - either outro or tap or somesuch. Loop always follows Intro seamlessly, so it's all glitzy and smooth. Then you can create another spine animation which is basically just bones animating - your separate button spine anims can be anchored to that animation and suddenly you can have buttons swishing in the scene in a choreographed manner, you can tweak all those animations on your own leisure, without pestering programmer who has "real work to do, you twat!" and so on.
Add some events at the end of various animations calling up new animations and suddenly you can have nicely timed stuff wooshing around your screen And The Programmer Is Happy because you havent pestered him too much.
Because they are like dads on Sunday morning, arent they - present but only kinda when it comes to eye candy 😃
Overall I'm quite happy with Spine. Frankly, I had not even tried animation before encountering Spine, just illustration. I might not be the best animator around the block but as long as you have some basic sense of rhythm and timing, Spine allows you go all autodidact-y and still come up with some neat stuff.
Uff.. again love-letter-y stuff.
