My Spine!

Hello again! It’s been a fun first week!

Making the journal prettier

First–and I know it’s not important–I made the site look a little bit nicer.

Last week, it looked like this:

And now I’ve got a logo and a larger font:

But yeah, yeah, yeah. That was just a fun little thing to make myself feel better. The big plan was to learn Spine, right?

Getting to grips with Spine

Oh, boy. Spine really is a thing! I’m only a week into learning it–which is really just a couple of days, alongside my day job–and I can’t say I love it yet, but I am falling in love.

It’s a big app. It’s complicated. I feel a bit like I’m learning Blender again, but with way fewer tutorials online. It’s hard work.

And there’s a free trial, which is nice, but you can’t save your progress, so you can only trial it with a project as big as you’re willing to build without turning your PC off. For us newbies, that ain’t much. I can accept not allowing exports during the trial, but disabling saving? Bleh.

And here’s the worst of it: you can’t upgrade the trial app to a paid app, so everything you build during the trial will be lost.

The trial just feels weirdly unfair. You can’t build anything decent, and you really wouldn’t want to anyway, so evaluating the app is tough. I suspect I’m not the only customer who ended up paying before they were sure, just to enable the save button. And I don’t regret paying, really. I just wish I was feeling more enthusiastic.

But enough moaning! I dedicated Friday to getting to grips with the basics, and I got a ball rolling from left to right:

I made the three assets–background, ball and shadow–in Affinity Designer 2. The ball has three bones; one that rotates the ball, one that carries the shadow, and a parent bone that translates them both across the stage together.

And yeah, the theory is basic, but it took me a solid day to work out which buttons to press to achieve it!

After that, I felt confident enough to try a walk cycle:

Not bad, right?! There are just three art assets; the body, a stick that gets reused four times for the thighs and shins, and a single foot that’s reused on both sides. And there are a few more bones this time, with inverse kinematics on the thighs and shins, and mesh deformation on the toes.

I made a bit of a meal of the keyframing and animating, but I learned a ton! It’s going to be so much easier next time.

Next time…

I’d sort of planned to make a more detailed character before thinking about integrating them into MonoGame, but I’m pretty hyped about building something interactive. So, next time I check in, maybe I’ll have the first stub of a game to show you?

See you then!