Animating Character Interactions (Best Practice)

Hi Guys!

I'm currently animating away on my first little Visionaire Game and have a few hypothetical questions when it comes to Characters interacting with each other.

I.e.: I have a character walking over to the player (with the normal walkcycle and Send to Action) and then punch the player character in the face. Now, would you do the Punching animation in a separate PNG sequence with both characters in them or try to split it up and kind of time the reaction of the Player to the Punch of the Attacker? Same applies to stuff like death animations that don't occur in the same place but can happen anywhere. The trouble i see is, how do i make sure that the switch from the standard Idle/Walking animation to the one where both are on the same frame is not visible? I mean if i could try kind of figuring out the location of where the character will appear when the seperate one gets hidden but thats really kind of difficult since i can't really preview animation on a scene itself it seems...

The other thing i want to do is this: i got a warden come into a jail cell. My character is tied up to a pole. The warden stands close to the Player with his back turned to him. With a click on the Warden, the player snatches away his key with his foot. Now, i can animate this in my Sprite Editor on the Scene itself but yeah.. Just maybe you can help me out with some general concepts

Hope this all makes sense and thank you!

How about the character stretches her two legs and folds to the warden and chokes him to suffocate?

Well, the muscles needed in order to do this action.

I'll answer second thing. First, make the condition named Warden Turn Around. Then, make it True (it means default is false) when the Warden stands there. Make the object named Warden's Key and draw its action area to the point where the warden stands that position (in that pic). Assign the condition to this object. And add actions mouse left click and put sequence what you want.

How about the character stretches her two legs and folds to the warden and chokes him to suffocate?

Actually a neat idea which i just might steal So how would you change from the seperate characters to the choking animation?

Yeah, it's a short game. In order to make it impressive comic actions may be added.

In character's outfit section, there is something named character animations (it would be located in bottom).

Add the animation in there. And in the cut-scene, add play animation/hide animation from animation tab.

Then, just put it from your character's outfit. Make sure character's animation is aligned to left. But in order to this animation work, you need to arrange the character over the warden. And you may hide character's right leg because it should be behind the warden.

So it's two separate animations then, one for the Character moving her legs and one for the Pink guy struggling and choking instead of a png sequence with the whole thing and both characters inside, right?

Yes. Try it. Let me know it. I'll stay here around 30 mins before sleep.

And I just noticed it takes times to draw animations for the actions from now. Lee will answer gently after me. Haha..

Haha no problem i'll start that animation in the morning but i totally know now how to go about it thanks for your help!!

Ok... not read the entire thread. My head is a little bleh at the minute. Been staring at the screen too long methinks.

Quick tip: for getting the timings of interactions correct, you can edit & add actions directly inside of animation frames. So taking that into consideration, say you want to have your character pick something up from the screen with a unique interaction animation, then you could add an action that toggles a condition to hide the scene object & add it to your inventory at a specific frame.

As for splitting up animations... I sometimes split up a single animation into multiple animations because I may want loop certain parts multiple times or I might want the play order of a certain part of the animation to be different (forwards, backwards, random).

Hi there, soooo everything works perfectly so far except that the Maiden is BEHIND the Warden but i animated it in a way that she should be in front of him. Is there a way to change her Z-Order so that it plays correctly? I only found this for Objects unfortunately... Thanks!!

How about move the Warden slightly behind the Maiden around 2 ~ 3 pixels so the Maiden in front of him.

You can do it by set character to position from character tab.

Yeah guess that'll have to do. Damn, it doesn't align quite properly anymore but it should work thanks.