@Ignatz - a lot depends on the game your trying to create, but the bill board approach (like you suggested) worked brilliantly on Doom (and all the other games of the same era). I bet Codea could handle a Doom clone without too much trouble.
it depends also on the level of realism of whatever art style/ game genre that you’re going for. ie the original Prince of Persia had all sorts of ways that you could interact with the environment, and went for full rotoscoped realism. That would be an insane amount of work, no matter whether you were implementing it in 2D or 3D. But more arcade-y games have way less animation. Something like Oceanhorn for instance, the characters just have walk/ attack/ stand animations (ie the same three actions as above), and that’s it. And it’s one of the most gorgeous, graphically-acclaimed games on iOS.
Billboarding would work fine for a retro FPS, but it’s not any substitute for this kind of fluid animation.
I agree that getting assets out of one package into another is always a somewhat laborious round trip (this is equally true with 2D assets though, like a spritesheet).
On the plus side though, the animation editor is actually one of the nicest and more intuitive parts of the Blender interface (not that that’s saying much). A walk cycle takes only a few minutes to create. Blender, when you take into account that it’s free, multi-platform, and has enormous support in terms of tutorials, models online, import/export scripts etc, is the best tool for the job as far as I can see (even if the UI is irritating at times). I know of no comparable system for 2D animation (the $60 version of Spine is probably closest).
The alternative to the Blender/Spine skeleton-rig approach is old-school, hand drawn animation with onion-skinning etc. That’s hard work, and requires actual animation skills (which I don’t have). If I were creating a strictly two-D game with fluidly animating characters, with the tools and skills available to me, the easiest way would be to project the kinds of 3D animations shown above orthogonally, rather than trying to create a spritesheet.
Is there a definitive link to the most current project code? There are lots of links in the post and I’m not sure which of them is the latest, if any.
@yojimbo2000 Ok I’m dumb, it’s totally easy to figure out how to get the latest code.
Dayummmmmm this is sweet. Has anyone used it in a game or project?