Actions | Smack Studio Tutorial

actions in smack Studio are quite powerful so I want to demonstrate them here to do that let's go to the dash animation on the left and you'll see on this actions timeline we have two keyframes for actions one here and one here the first one basically every time the character dashes it plays a sound effect and it plays a visual effect so let's play this animation and see what's going on here all right so it looks like our robot friend here takes out his rocket arms to give himself a little boost to dash here and what you can do is if there's a sound effect or a visual effect you can actually preview it by clicking this preview button here so you can see when this animation starts it this little dust effect appears and then this sound plays pretty quiet but you can hear it and so whenever the character dashes that place and here on this action it says go to and play Dash frame zero what that means is it's going to play when it reaches the end of this animation and you're still dashing it's going to go back here at the beginning so to see what that looks like an action no pun intended let's do a test play and see what it looks like okay so there's the sound and you can see the little puff of uh dust there but it's not really doing an ideal it's not really ideal it's looping in a way that makes it look a little bit janky so let's fix that so instead of changing it so that when it reaches the end of the animation it Loops back to the beginning let's change it so it Loops right here so this is frame 16 you can tell because this is frame 15. so this is 16. and I'm going to change this so it goes from frame offset 0 to 16. hit enter And now when it reaches the end of the animation which is here it's going to loop back to this Frame and repeat here so that means if we're still dashing we'll still be in this position let's try that out and see if it works all right look at that it's doing exactly what we want very nice so a few things that we can do to further enhance it or add some visual effects and some sound effects just like like this this Dash uh sound is great for the dash but what about a sound for a rocket to pop to one of this when the thrusters start start firing let's have a sound effect play there so to do that I'm going to right click this and select new empty keyframe and that's going to give me some options to add some actions or if I like I can go here to the right and select new sound and that works as well and I'm going to search for let's say energy blast and let's pick energy blast small so now when this Frame plays it's going to play this sound now it's a little bit loud for me so I'm going to change it to 0.7 and volume it's a bit better and I'm going to change the pitch to 0.8 you can take one sound effect and make it sound completely different by just changing the pitch here's a point one that sounds way more powerful and it's the same sound effect and that was just by changing the play speed if you want to make it sound even faster you can do something like this and it sounds like a a very minor hit the slower or the lower the pitch the more powerful it sounds essentially so I think that's a pretty good one and then I think what we'll also do is on the frame where he's picking up some speed we're going to add another action and we're going to add a visual effect which also you could do by going here and selecting new and we're going to pick dust let's do dusk ground burst and let's preview what that looks like nice that looks perfect if you wanted to you could adjust the offset so if you do like negative 20 it'll go a little bit more behind them if you're negative 70 it's even more behind him so we'll stick with negative 10 for now you can also adjust the vertical offset and if you want it to be attached you can do that so it the the lingering effect will travel with the character or it'll be left in in the dust so to speak so let's leave that on I like how that's looking let's see how it looks in the game all right so now we have an additional burst of dust and we have a sound but there is one thing missing still I think to really accentuate this effect I think we need to give them a little bit of a burst of speed so to do that along with the dust we're going to add another action by clicking here and we're going to search for set horizontal speed we'll do set horizontal movement velocity more specifically and we're going to set this value to say 10. and what that's going to do is not only on this Frame is it going to play the dust effect it's also going to increase the horizontal velocity of the character at the same time so that happens during a dash so let's see what happens all right so it gives me a little bit of a boost there you can see and that really helps sell it a bit more which is pretty cool so Let's uh see what happens if you change that number to something more wild like 50. okay he flies off which is pretty funny so you don't obviously want something like this but they'll just helps this just helps demonstrate kind of what you can do with actions cool now let's say that I like that sound effect and I wanted to use it elsewhere well yes you can copy and paste those keyframes as well so if I hit Ctrl C to copy it and I go to let's say to the jump animation I want it to fire when he fires these Rockets as well you can see his thrusters ignited about here I'll paste that there with Ctrl V and let's see if it plays when he jumps now look at that so not only does he play that sound when he dashes but he also plays when he jumps all right to demonstrate additional events and actions I do want to showcase an existing move from our friend Granite here which is his side B so he rolls into this ball and there's a bunch of interesting properties here well he goes in a direction and there's differences depending on if he's in the air or if he's on the ground so to demonstrate that a bit more I'm going to show you what it looks like in test play so here's side beats on the ground so you can see there's a kind of a dust trail there it makes a certain sound but if I'm in the air there's no dust trail and it makes slightly different sounds but if I use in there and then land he bounces so those are all different done with different actions so let's check those out now so you can see here in the very first keyframe you have set temporary air control settings these two functions provide a One-Stop shop that works to create almost every type of special movement control seen in most platform Fighters without needing to know any code you obviously want to make adjustments and things to make sure that it works and do some tweaking but it's pretty intuitive once you start using it also by default when the animation ends these values will automatically revert to default so if you were to leave the animation there's not a risk that you'll break some other animation or something by using these and if you hover over each of these gives you a brief description of what each of these are doing and with our stock characters in smack Studio we'll provide additional comments that further clarifies what they're doing so for example here when the side B starts and let's say that you're in the air set temporary air control settings this is set to zero which means that the player doesn't have as much control over influencing the character's speed and game for example at zero here it's a high commitment move so if you have the number one or even beyond that that gives the player even more control during the attack and down here this means that you can't fast fall out of that side B and here this means that Landing will not end the animation and that's important because as you saw when Granite landed he actually did a special bouncing animation that's unique to this attack all right so those are the temporary air control settings for the ground control settings something similar where this was set to zero and this here is set to True which means he can actually roll off of platforms if this is set to false he wouldn't roll off of platforms another thing to keep in mind is you can create custom variables so when he's in this side B he enters a state which is defined in this set of variables here and to quickly explain what variables are they're basically containers that hold a piece of data that can change over time rather the value can change over time which is why it's called a variable so you can set a variable you can add to it subtract from it use the current value in your actions and that will control the flow of your animations or you can do things like add cool down timers store charges for attacks Etc so the type of variable will determine what kind of data it can hold like earlier we showed the Boolean which is either true or fall but there can be integers that can be whole numbers there's a lot of different kinds of variables and this is honestly its own video but just to give you a quick idea of what it is in this case we are looking specifically at a true and false one so you can see side b ball form is a Boolean which is a type variable and it resets on death and it resets when the character returns to idle so it is not the default value meaning he's not always inside B form side B has to actually trigger this and this further explains it so back to these temporary error control settings things are zeroed out here but once he turns into a ball then you want to give him some momentum so here you can see not only does it play this sound but it changes the temporary air control settings to a horizontal speed of 10 and a vertical speed of 0 that helps him not fall too far but stay horizontally moving and you can see these kind of grayed out options there are additional options you can experiment with and turn on if you'd like so let's go down to set Boolean and this is where we set that variable that we looked at earlier to true and now that he's in this state we're going to check to see if he's on the ground if he's on the ground play this kind of this sound because he's you know on the ground and everything and create this dust effect but if he's not that will not play meaning he'll be in the air and those effects will not play that's what this if then variable will be the idea's condition is on ground equals true only do that otherwise do not do that and this happens every couple of keyframes or so because you want to continue to add dust particle effects it'll play a sound again so at the end of his rolling animation here you'll notice that we do some resetting for those temporary air control settings so we change the air friction multiplier we allow canceling from the attack and the animation I should say and we do that as well on the ground and then of course we set the Boolean to false so that Boolean is no longer active that variable of side b ball form is no longer active and depending on whether or not he's on the ground if it's true then you're going to jump to this Frame and just get up or if you're on the ground if you're not on the ground if it's false you're going to jump to frame 70. so let's scroll and see what frame 70 is all right there is that bounce animation that we saw earlier so depending on what state he's in by the time the animation finishes he'll either land like this or he'll land like this or he shouldn't say I shouldn't say land the animation will end this way the last thing I want to call out is you'll see these gaps here that's because there's nothing going on here there doesn't need to be because by the time you reach this animation it makes a decision either you're in the ground or you're not and if you're not on the ground you're going to play this animation if you're already on the ground it's going to play this animation when you land you'll notice here at the very end there's a return to idle action pretty much every animation should end this way there can be exceptions though back to our side B here let's change some of these properties and I'll demonstrate to you how they change in game so first of all let's do the fun thing and just crank up that speed to a ridiculous amount let's say 100 that's gonna probably instantly kill our friend Granite here but we're gonna try it anyways and then of course we're going to want to adjust this to say from can move off of platforms to false and let's see if he actually stays and doesn't fall off the platform but he zooms let's just let's test it out all right look at that so we Zoom at ridiculous speeds but because we changed it so that he doesn't fall off the ledge he's actually safe but as soon as we use it in the air I'm afraid he won't be so lucky alright so there you have it I'm going to show you a complete list of different actions that you have access to here so if you click new action you can add a comment you can add a line break that's just for to kind of back end helpfulness but then you can add an if then and else if and else you have all of these options here you can set a Boolean and you can get pretty crazy with a lot of these options this has to do with using projectiles with your movement in all directions what happens during an ultra attack self-healing what happens during a grab and there's a whole lot to back in we basically just scratched the surface you'll want to explore the variables section the events section and the stats section to really make the most use out of all these capabilities so in fact let's just take a few seconds and talk about the importance of events and kind of how they work you'll notice on the left here there are Global events so this will happen no matter what across every animation every time your character dies this event will happen every time your character grabs a ledge these are some examples that you can also remove if you like but you can add more there's also animation specific events like this side B and they're actually very easy to understand so this side B is going to detect whether or not side b ball form is true and if it satisfies this Boolean condition every time your character lands in this case Granite it's going to set the movement velocity to 5 is going to play a certain sound and this is essentially The Bouncing animation that Granite enters into and so that's how that works and of course on a wall which is another event that you can add which says on move into wall it's going to do something a little bit different it's gonna change be a different animation it's going to play a slightly different sound and this is when Granite hits a wall during as long as side b ball form is true it's going to play these sets of actions so that gives you an idea of what events are we're so excited to see what you create thank you so much for watching

Channel: Smack Studio

Views: 4,278

Keywords: smack studio, platform fighter, fighting game, indie game, pixel art, pixel art generator, creat characters games, create a character, stage editor, stage creator, 2.5 d unrela engine, 2.5 games, 2.5 animation software, pixel art game, competitive platform fighter, create character online, pixel art rotation, rotating pixel art, 3D Pixel Art

Id: vtuq5Ogp4X0

Length: 15min 38sec (938 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 05 2023