Flick Detection (and December update)

So, first comes the birb update:

The papercraft toys from the Kickstarter were finished, shipped to backers, and can also now be directly purchased HERE. Most of the work this month went into two MAJOR events, though:

We announced we were hitting Switch, and that just exploded. Folks seem excited. Yay! So that's all our launch platforms now, birb will be on Desktop, Xbox and Switch. The most important part was when Kekeflipnote did an animation. Well, that, and when SunhiLegend (the person who does the cool slow-mo GIFs of big popular AAA games) did one of birb too! YAY! Oh and Nintendo <3 Birbs apparently.

Then we did this huge demo event as part of The Video Game Awards and everyone got to play the level we'd been working on for the last couple of weeks. Was still super early and just a small sandbox to skate around in, but folks seemed to dig it. Huzzah! The Steam demo was the first time you could manual in a VERY long time. I'd had the trick itself in ages ago, but hadn't done the tap up/down to trigger it yet.

Oh and we got Galahs into the game already, AND we figured out how to do the crests properly. Thank Alex for that!

That's kinda it for stuff. If you're a Kickstarter backer, the papercraft toys went out BEFORE Christmas (and you maybe got them before), and the mini-skateboards are also in the mail (but went out a few days after Christmas sorry!) and we're still working on getting the pins shipped.

Now then, for the geeky chat. Let's talk about Flick Detection:

Flicks are used mostly when you're mapping joystick input to a shortcut or combo input. Street Fighter is the simplest go-to example, where a lot of your moves involve flicking the stick left, then right, then a kick (or a punch or etc), all done quickly as the combo input to pull off a single move. Quarter Circle Forward (QCF), aka the Hadoken or fireball or god knows how many other moves, is realistically just a series of flicks with tight timing.

Anyways, they're also used in skate games sometimes. The Tony Hawk games used them as your manual combo, with a quick down/up or up/down flick getting you a manual or nose manual respectively. That's cool! I want that! So here's how I did it.

I started with this. This was hilariously broken:

After that, I had this. This almost worked, but generated excess up/down events.

... and $3 patrons should check out the code post for how I fixed that. It may or may not be relevant to you, but I do some additional processing on my input before it gets to this point. That, it turned out, was breaking this detection, woops. So I had to swap to using the RAW input, here.

I don't claim this to be the best way, but it works, and I dig it. If I wanted to use this to extract QCF events or the like, I could do that too, just by reading out the "Hard" inputs directly, instead of converting them into Flicks. It's a simple, handy system that hopefully folks will enjoy. So there ya go!