More subtle animation + one bad news

Another small update on my game development. 

I just added subtle head turn to my characters, so they can appear to be more lifelike. (Please watch the video above to see the early result.)

However, there's a setback on the development due to the compatiability issue between the animation software and the game engin I use to develop my game. 

I use Live2D to animate my 2D drawings, however, the lastest version is not compatiable with Tyranobuilder (the software for my game development). Tyranobuilder appears to be a little bit dated at the moment, cause the developper of Tyranobuilder hasn't updated it for almost two years (some people on the internet even joked about it being "abandonware"), and it's no longer compatiable with the current version of Live2D. For this reason, I can't import the animated models into the game.

So what does it mean?

Well, unfortunately, it means I can not have natively animated characters in the game, which means all the characters will be stick figures again.

I'm not a software engineer or tech expert, so unless the software developper suddenly decide to update their outdated software tomorrow, there's nothing I can do.

However, I still found two ways to work around this problem. The first one is to export the character animation as Gif images. At first look, it looks great, but the problem is that high quality gif images file is about 100 times bigger than a normal jpeg image, so it causes the game to run slower, and there's a lot of lagging. The second solution I found is to export the character animation as videos, with my video editing skill, I can put the character animation and background art work together, and set it as a video background in the game. It looks OK, but the quality is not as good as if I important the models natively into the game.

The silverlining here is that, I'm still very early in the development of the game, so maybe the developper of tyranobuilder will update their game engin one day, and that'll be the best scenario, so I'll be able to import all animated characters into game. And there's will be a lot of bouncing pecs, I promise you.

I feel more frustrated than disappointed at this moment. I'm about to release another demo for you guys on Patreon, and I would love to have the "wow" factor when you can see the characters breathing in real time on your screen. Now I can't. It's frustrating. Not to mention all the time and effort I put into learning the animation.

I won't let this beat me up though.

I'm still actively looking for an solution. My latest attemps was to download the japanese version of Tyranobuilder which is more advanced than the English version, and try to figure out if I could import my Live2D models into the japanese version. Anyway, one thing is for sure, it's a big setback for my game develpment. I just want you to know that. It won't affect the story of the game and the release of the 2nd demo, but there probably won't be any pec bouncing daddies in the demo.

After all, it's still early, I might be considering changing the game developping engin after this.

Have a great day. 😊