Week 40: Tiny Animator

A week that did not go exactly as planned!

At the very beginning of the week, I started working again on the Pico-8 nested engine, and had a difficult time with it (because UI) and then I started making a tiny animation editor, which turned out to take all the rest of the week and is now out for Patreon patrons! During the week, I also took some time to analyze design elements in a few games, in order to prepare ground for my new project.

(edit: Tiny Animator is now out for everyone, on the Pico-8 BBS!)

This is the first week since I started doing the doodles that didn’t see any new Pico-8 doodle. Super sorry about that, so instead, here are a few mini-doodles from the last two weeks that I didn’t post here yet.

 

Before you think I’ve gone lazy, here is the thing I devoted my week to: Tiny Animator!

What was supposed to be a personal tool for making and exporting tiny animations easily became a Patreon exclusive thing and then a public project with an early release for Patreon patrons.

The editor features skeletal bases, skins, a bunch of classic editor features (I think) such as mirror frame horizontally and vertically, align skeleton to grid, duplicate and delete frames, move them around, etc. The animations can be saved and loaded through the clipboard (you can copy your save in a text file) and they can be exported, either as a .png of all the frames or to the clipboard as formatted Pico-8 sprites, which you can paste directly into any Pico-8 sprite-sheet.

I’m really happy with it, even though I still want to add a few features, at least for my own personal use, such as depth control on skeleton nodes and an export that can easily be reskinned outside of the editor.

I chose to not make it a Patreon exclusive because of all the attention it got on Twitter and the many people who told me they wanted to try it. So the tool is already out for 8$+ Patreon patrons since yesterday, it will be available to all 3$+ patrons later today and it will be publicly released on the Pico-8 BBS sometime during the week!

 

I didn’t mention it before on this post but Tuesday I also released the very first Patreon-exclusive Doodle Insights! It’s about splines, the uses they have, the uses they could have and the fact that they are a very powerful tool with lots of potential, with a step-by-step explanation of three spline-based doodles! Patreon patrons can get access to it there!

The second Doodle Insights should get released tomorrow and it will be a bit different! But still very interesting! ;D

 

The new project is still super secret for now… But here’s a little tease anyway: one of the games I started analyzing this week is about interacting with a village of cute animals. I shall not say more! :X

 

Also, today I’m announcing the results for Tiny-TV Jam! I might talk a bit more about that next week!

 

It’s been a pretty good week!

Next week should see the return of the Pico-8 doodles and probably the very first pictures of the new project!

Have a great week!

Take care!

TRASEVOL_DOG