David here!

This is my first blog post for the Thimbleweed Park 2 dev blog, and I hope not the last. I’m going to talk about character animation in the game, a bit about process and tools.

In Thimbleweed Park 1 (ok, it was never called that, just Thimbleweed Park, are we retconning the game name?), we used a home-grown (Ron-created) character animation program called Compy. It had some basic features, and emitted json files describing the animation sequences along with the individual cells that could be layered on top of each other to create the character animations you saw in the game. For example, Agent Ray’s body was separate from her head, so while her body was walking, we could independently animate her head and mouth. Likewise we had another layer for eye blinks, another for accessories (hats, nose glasses).

In Return to Monkey Island, our characters were all vector-based, created with the animation tool, Spine. For Thimbleweed Park 2 we’re back to pixel-based characters. Rather than updating Compy, we selected the popular Aseprite for 2D pixel animations ($19.99 on Steam or Aseprite’s website). Ron used it on his recent pixel-based RPG Death by Scrolling, and wanted to stick with it.

I learned enough about Aseprite to import some of the animated characters from the first game… a somewhat mind-numbing and tedious task… opening all the frames in the Mac app Preview, then copying/pasting each image into Aseprite’s cell in the timeline. Then apply some magic (Ron’s Python script exportaseprite.py) which exports each animation cell as a PNG, and then packs them into sprite sheets, and keeps track of all the named animation sequences.

First spoiler: there are Polaroid cameras in this game just like Thimbleweed Park 1 (opening scene with the agents) and in the Delores standalone game. This time both Agents Ray and Reyes have their own cameras, and we needed more animation sequences than just the right-facing and kneeling photo-taking animation from the first game.

In fact, we needed nine sequences… versions for taking photos of low objects, medium height objects, and tall objects. Plus versions for right-facing, back-facing, and front-facing, so 3 x 3 = 9. (When the character faces left we just flip the right-facing animations.)

Each animation is made up of multiple short segments, to give us more control of timing. For example, when we want to trigger a sound effect and a screen flash. Octavi took this on as his first project for the game:

Camera out—actor takes the camera out of their jacket, or wherever they magically store it

Camera hold—actor holds the last frame with the camera in position to take the photo

Camera shot—photo is taken as the flash goes off in four frames, and separately we trigger the sound effect and also flash the screen for a quarter of a second

Camera in—camera ejects the photo, actor shakes out the instant photo to dry it off, puts away the camera and returns to a standing position

That means our original nine sequences are made up of four segments each, for a total of 36 segments. Fortunately, all elements of each frame were flattened, so we didn’t have separate talking heads, moving eyeballs, etc.

To keep this all straight, we used a naming convention and tagged the object to be photographed with low, med, or high, and we also set the actor’s facing in the object (front, right, back). Gathering that information from the object, we knew which animations to trigger:

camera_out_[low, med, high]_[front, right, back]

camera_hold_[low, med, high]_[front, right, back]

camera_shot_[low, med, high]_[front, right, back]

camera_in_[low, med, high]_[front, right, back]

Octavi started with the Delores camera animations as a template (from the Delores game), and then created a similar set for Agent Ray. It took a few iterations to get everything perfect. Rather than trying to figure out if it was correct in Aseprite (challenging when there were so many segments to check), I set up a test room so we could check the animations in context… of course I picked the disgustingly gross Thimbleweed Park QuickiePal Bathroom for the photoshoot!

The bathroom doesn’t appear in Thimbleweed Park 2, but it’s finished art and a good test.

I didn’t have any targets for a front-facing photo, so I used temp programmer art, then made a QuickTime video and shared it with Octavi.

When we looked at the animation in the room, we spotted a few issues. One showed a several-pixel jump from the end of the camera animation to the beginning of the normal standing animation. Once corrected, Octavi then created the same animations for Agent Reyes, and I again sent him a movie for him to confirm all was perfect.

For the in-game test interactions, we started with the Delores UI, where the player can drag an inventory object (the camera) out of their inventory and place it over the item to be photographed. Note that the UI in this video is WIP, and will likely go through multiple iterations throughout the development of the game.

– David Fox