As mentioned in my previous dev blog, the animation system used in Blobbit Push was created using a piece of software called Dragon Bones. At the time it worked great but over the years it appears to have been neglected by the developers. So much so that there no longer appears to be a download page, which suggests the project is now dead. The old site has been re-uploaded to github.io, with various pages not working.

If a lot of the animations had not been done I think I would have just switched to something like Spine or even Blender but that’s not quite an option. Thankfully Mark has found a way to convert the files into Spine files which work great in Godot. He tells me it’s not a simple drag and drop affair so to avoid wasting time, I suggested I go through and finish all the outstanding animations before Mark converts them all to the new format. Looking at the file dates the last time the source animation file was saved was… wait for it… February 2018!! WOW!

The last time I used Dragon Bones professionally was for the development of the interactive video adventure version of Deathtrap Dungeon back in 2019. I created all the UI animations seen in the game and associated artwork including the logo. Loading the software today, I have to confess I need to re-acquaint myself with it as it feels so alien after a break of five years!

On first inspection the assets appear to be all present, but some of them do look a little unfinished. Oh and the aspect ratio of the animation files are set to that of a portrait phone screen so first up is to create a landscape 16:9 version of this file from which to work on.

There are two animation files used for Blobbit Push, one containing all the UI stuff and the other containing the games sprites. All the sprites are built up from a series of animation files containing the base layer pixel art with various effects overlaid on top to provide any additional animation tweaks. Only possible using a skeletal animation system such as Dragon Bones or Spine. I should note we did originally use Spriter Pro, but due to the lack of updates and a few bugs which ended in data loss, we decided to ditch it.

This post is incomplete….More to come…