Animation, Sound and Immersion

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

I love CDDA. I always get the newest developement version and use chesthole texture pack, and a modified chethole soundpack. I want this game to be the most beautifull, immersive and fast paced roguelike ever.

I find that a good quality sound pack adds so much immersion to the game, and it got me thinking two things -

What if I made a series of pretty split-second gifs (or avi’s?), as many as possible, for different situations within the game and programmed them in, and have sounds to go with them maybe.

For example, If you kill a zombie brute with a crit, a short, satisfying silhuette slow mo- paralactic style gif pops up to amplify the situation. Or have a 1/100 chance for a similar sort of thing to happen with a normal zombie, and have different gifs for different types of weapons and enemies.
As well as cool gifs for situations like engine failure, zombies breaking in during the night, mutataions, drug use, explosions and such.

Played with cool sound effects, It might work and make the game even more awesome. Make those special moments stand out even more.

My other idea was a simple voiced protagonist that says cool stuff under certain conditions with a nice generic badass voice. This might go well along with the clips, with the character making comments when finding weapons, starting vehicles, getting sick, scoring crits and just doing things.

I have a nice voice, can do some nice animation and have basic understanding of programming.
But I’ve never made a mod for anything, other than small random adjustments in scripts or files
and I might need guidance with scripts and stuff…

Just wondering what others think about all this.

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What if I made a series of pretty split-second gifs (or avi's?), as many as possible, for different situations within the game and programmed them in, and have sounds to go with them maybe.

Dunno how well the engine would take to that, but assuming its possible, It’d still be a SIGNIFICANT number of art assets. Especially once you get onto having different types for different gear and opponents.

My other idea was a simple voiced protagonist that says cool stuff under certain conditions with a nice generic badass voice. This might go well along with the clips, with the character making comments when finding weapons, starting vehicles, getting sick, scoring crits and just doing things.

I’d be against this simply because it’d get annoying incredibly fast. It’d be the sorta thing you’d leave on for your first run, then probably never really touch again.

Played with cool sound effects, It might work and make the game even more awesome. Make those special moments stand out even more.

I’m indifferent to the idea of general sound effects though. Some folks would probably enjoy having some basic audio cues. I thought there were some soundpacks already available out there though, don’t remember off the top of my head.

If you wanna try modding in all this, go right ahead. I’m not sure how much of it the engine would immediately support, you’d likely have to do some programming with the core game itself, I don’t think all this could be managed with scripts. Unless it was like, ASCII animation and just replaced the current hitmarker floating text. That might be more manageable.

3

Yeah cool thanks. Seems like it could get annoying… but I dunno. Maybe not if it’s done right. Good animations can work good, even if they are a little repetetive, like Brutal Doom. Maybe I could do something external that reads the log like DF soundsense.
I have a good example of what I intend to do, but it’s 1mb, too big for this I dunno how to post it here. Nonetheless, it looks very nice, generic shotgun kill.
It’s done to look like a roadsign silhuette.

4

You could upload it to Imgur and then post a link to the image instead of hotlinking it.

5

Obviously a mod and calls for mod-team since so many assets are needed. Make that mod great and working and it might be viable for merging as permanent feature, when its ready.

I just don’t see this realistically happening without separate developement team committed to this thing. Thus MOD it is if it is something.

It would be so much more likely to happen if you had enough assets ready and presentable. I mean, like for example every zombie type death animations and enough different soundscapes to fill the world already. And abllity and desire to provide more, so someone could commit to creating this thing in code level without fear of artists, animators and sound people bailing out in midprogress because it was too much work for them without pay.

6

http://imgur.com/5qduDLl

Right thanks… link above this is what I mean. It’s a quick example I made in half an hour. But if I made a whole bunch of these in this sort of style, probably better quality. Eh?
If I could make an external Java Script image displayer or something that runs alongside the game and reads a log and plays nice gifs at climactic or interesting moments. I don’t know, I’m no pro.

7

Anyone played Battle for Wesnoth? Were you thinking of attack animations like that game has?

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Me and you are pretty much on the same page, my friend.

I would LOVE for there to be animations. You could put a bounty on this issue, if you want to.

I love making animations:

Also, I had the idea for crits to make the character talk, I even got a professional voice actor to record them. I think we even had a pr in, but it never got finished.

I would like to be able to add layovers (and animations ultimately) for being drunk, poisoned, sick, asleep, and everything else like in this issue.

We just need a dev to take interest in tiles mode! We have had them in the past, and I got some great tools out of it, but we do not have one right now.

Dying animations could be really fun, too!

9

Gifs sounds good. Small problem; mutated/robotic/oddly dressed characters might need their own assets to keep up immersion.

10

I would tentatively support the inclusion of some limited animations if it were primarily for quality of life purposes (IE, making important things like zombies easier to see on an often cluttered map)

Adding a bunch of animations purely for flavor doesn’t sit well with me. I’ve posted in other threads that I think the very simple graphical presentation is half of what makes games like this so special, in that they leave so much latitude for the player’s imagination to create stories.

So while I’m not completely opposed to the idea, I would only want to see it implemented very carefully so as to not jeopardize the game’s barebones aesthetic, which I believe is a crucial factor in its appeal to me.

11

Having the tileset support to make them wouldn’t hurt, though. And obviosly, being able to disable them. I just think of moving water and moving grass at random intervals and i drool. I could definetly draw some. No idea how player animations would work with paperdolll though, sadly.