Manual Character Walking - RPG Game Style
Dec 29, 2020
I've had an idea for creating an adventure-based educational game for over a year but had been unable to simulate manually-controlled walking in articulate similar to game engines. "Heroland" used clickable buttons for motion, another sample used a slider, but typical games use key presses to move. Unfortunately, if you trigger the relative-start-point motion path by holding down a key they don't seem to obey the duration causing the character to fly across the "map".
Today I finally achieved an acceptable workaround that I figured I'd share. Basically I used states on the character, motion paths on the background, and a T/F variable to send the walk command without actually using key press as the determining factor. In order to force the desired duration of each key press I used audio files that I synced up to the motion path duration. There may be a simpler method than this brute force solution, but the end result is exactly what I've been daydreaming of for a long time. EDIT: I've since seen the following example which is better than mine https://community.articulate.com/e-learning-examples/storyline-side-scroller-game although it's unclear how they prevented the rapid sending of motion paths.
This is just a crude sample of the walk-mechanic. I didn't put in boundaries or anything to interact with. The actual game would be MUCH larger.
Comments/suggestions welcome.
4 Replies
Do use a spritesheet for animated sequences... is a quite old-school but still valid solution for lots of games. This sample shows the basics.
https://360.articulate.com/review/content/e6ef28b7-3dcf-4b76-b156-8b50dee8b79e/review
Not a walking animation but thats feasible too.
Gonna make a sample of that too...
And after seeing your sample... tiles to create an environment would be good too...
I actually used a character from a sprite sheet created in RPG Maker MV but I cropped out the poses I needed as PNG. I'm not sure if there's a more useful sprite workflow. I'm looking into CrazyTalk Animator to create the resources now.
I've since seen other people use motion paths with animated gifs, but they don't explain how they prevented the character from flying across the screen. Anyway, still working on it. The "escape the room" side scroller was pretty impressive.
When you use 1 single spritesheet and use the setup as shown here...
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/changing-state-directly-from-javascript?page=2
you can control any sprite with GSAP Steps...
https://greensock.com/docs/v3/Eases/SteppedEase
Gonna make a sample to show....
I just actually decided to figure out on my own how to do something similar to this. Right now, I can make the character move left or right across the screen, and even jump (with a small GIF animation). It's not perfect, but I figured out how to do most of this myself. Glutton for punishment.
Anyway, the motion issue you're referring to sounds quite similar to a problem I was having. If you held down the button, the character flies across the screen. To remedy this, I had to create a variable.
So, essentially, when the user presses the "right arrow key", that variable (true or false) adjusts to 'true' until the motion path animation completes. Then it toggles to false again.
Then, the trigger that causes the motion path has a condition set to it: if [walking variable] = false. So, basically, the motion path will only trigger if the variable is false. If it is true, then even if you hold down the key, it won't trigger until the variable toggles to "false" again after the original motion path completes.
I understand this was months ago. So, I'm sure you figured it out, but I thought I'd add it on here just in case. :)