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Creating a simple platformer game engine in AE
I just finished up a TV commercial for a local sports store that looks like a 8/16bit video game platformer (Mario/Sonic). Here’s the results:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/pd1mkpto0kuusc1/BeaverSports_8bitBilly.mp4
Unfortunately, this took HOURS and HOURS because I had to do all the positioning manually via keyframe animation. There are loads of expressions to animate the sprites and automate camera tracking, but the character animation, jumping, everything, is baked.
I may want to do other versions of this ad for different different sports, but it would actually have been easier if I had coded a simple platforming engine to achieve the motion. I could use keyframes as triggers in lue of button presses. UNFORTUNATELY, this is impossible using standard expression protocol, since expressions are ephemeral and can’t store values from cycle to cycle. Supposedly there are methods using text fields to store values, but I haven’t been able to make anything work, or find a good writeup on how that would be done. I’ve read concepts of storing functions in text fields, but nothing that allows me to re-evaluate a previous value. Without that, I can’t make this work.
Any thoughts? Even just a simple proof of concept.
Television Producer
KTVF-11 Fairbanks, Alaska
video.ericbarker.com -
1 Reply
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Would be interesting, might be easier to just use an actual game engine tho. Unity does 2D stuff now: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2013/08/28/unity-native-2d-tools/
Don’t know much at all about Processing but AEwriter seems to be a way to record interactive stuff and import into AE: https://www.kinecttopin.com/aewriter/
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