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Cutting useless battle animation length
Firecat1311- 10/17/2020 07:02 PM
- 1062 views
As I said last week, I want to start catching up on the kinds of posts I should've been making all along during this game's development. For that purpose, the most interesting thing to show off that I haven't yet would be... battle animations!
Rather than just showing a few samples, I want to go into some stuff: specifically, where I feel like RPG Maker's animation systems are lacking, and some things that can be done to work around its flaws.
First of all: RTP animations are slow as heck! Way too many frames.
But that's not all, they also have so many built-in awkward pauses. Even if your custom animation is really quick, it will always be slower than it should be.
It's also just really difficult to make nice-looking, fluid, and polished animations (The best I can do with RPGM still looks pretty stuff, despite the fact that my other games look like this).
Watch this:
Lyndsey swings her sword -> wait -> slash animation -> wait -> damage numbers pop up -> WAIT -> she moves back into her original position.
Lame! Slow! Tedious! Here's what I did. Using Yanfly's Action Sequences plugin, I was able to remove some of those unnecessary pauses. There's a bunch of detail for individual skill animations, but the gist of it:
This is all the Setup and Target Action sections really need for a standard skill, with N replaced with the number of frames until the impact happens in the animation. You'll probably want to add a motion or two and maybe adjust the "move user" bit depending on what you're doing, and whether it's a player or enemy animation. Anyway, how about I show rather than tell?
I've added a bit more flair to this animation, but the basic bits are there: quick step in, quick animation, quick transition to the next actor's turn.
Admittedly there's definitely still some awkwardness here (3 frames is really not enough for a good sword swing, but it's the most I can spare if I wanna ever finish this game) but it's notably faster, and a bit cooler, than the default.
But, that speed increase isn't too much of a big deal, right? Well... it adds up. Four player characters and 2-4 enemy characters performing actions, several wasted seconds each action, for hundreds if not thousands of actions throughout the game...
After streamlining all player and enemy skills, the total playtime for a "developer who knows everything hurrying through the game" playthrough of my game decreased from 10 hours to 6 hours. That's a huge chunk of time saved, and it would be even bigger for the average player! I hate wasting the player's time, and the default RPG Maker animation systems were definitely doing exactly that.
Design talk out of the way, here's a brief showcase of some of my skill animations, from simple to fancy (don't mind the occasional unfinished/placeholder sprites):
Rather than just showing a few samples, I want to go into some stuff: specifically, where I feel like RPG Maker's animation systems are lacking, and some things that can be done to work around its flaws.
First of all: RTP animations are slow as heck! Way too many frames.
But that's not all, they also have so many built-in awkward pauses. Even if your custom animation is really quick, it will always be slower than it should be.
It's also just really difficult to make nice-looking, fluid, and polished animations (The best I can do with RPGM still looks pretty stuff, despite the fact that my other games look like this).
Watch this:
Lyndsey swings her sword -> wait -> slash animation -> wait -> damage numbers pop up -> WAIT -> she moves back into her original position.
Lame! Slow! Tedious! Here's what I did. Using Yanfly's Action Sequences plugin, I was able to remove some of those unnecessary pauses. There's a bunch of detail for individual skill animations, but the gist of it:
<setup action>
clear battle log
display action
immortal: targets, true
move user: forward, 60, 5
</setup action>
<target action>
action animation
animation wait: N
action effect
</target action>]
This is all the Setup and Target Action sections really need for a standard skill, with N replaced with the number of frames until the impact happens in the animation. You'll probably want to add a motion or two and maybe adjust the "move user" bit depending on what you're doing, and whether it's a player or enemy animation. Anyway, how about I show rather than tell?
I've added a bit more flair to this animation, but the basic bits are there: quick step in, quick animation, quick transition to the next actor's turn.
Admittedly there's definitely still some awkwardness here (3 frames is really not enough for a good sword swing, but it's the most I can spare if I wanna ever finish this game) but it's notably faster, and a bit cooler, than the default.
But, that speed increase isn't too much of a big deal, right? Well... it adds up. Four player characters and 2-4 enemy characters performing actions, several wasted seconds each action, for hundreds if not thousands of actions throughout the game...
After streamlining all player and enemy skills, the total playtime for a "developer who knows everything hurrying through the game" playthrough of my game decreased from 10 hours to 6 hours. That's a huge chunk of time saved, and it would be even bigger for the average player! I hate wasting the player's time, and the default RPG Maker animation systems were definitely doing exactly that.
Design talk out of the way, here's a brief showcase of some of my skill animations, from simple to fancy (don't mind the occasional unfinished/placeholder sprites):
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