Gamedev Grievances #34: Taking Up Arms… Literally

A long-standing “feature” of Ambience has been the somewhat embarrassing fact that, well… none of the characters seem to have arms.

Some armless action from an earlier build of Ambience.

This was primarily because I’ve never been great at pixel art, so approaching this from a purely artistic perspective would have made for a very big and very painful job. First, I’d have to making sprites for every character walking and attacking in eight directions – arms included. Then I’d have to give the player the ability to hold and swing weapons. The thought of making a set of animated sprites for every weapon in the game was terrifying, to say the least.

Mathematically, however, this isn’t too difficult to pull off. I’d already used some clever maths to animate a hand swinging a weapon, as well as a generic creature attack. But I hadn’t yet done the same for a complete arm – mostly due to laziness.

But evenrually, I decided that enough was enough. I was tired of trying to convince myself of the normality of inexplicable floating hands. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work making some arms for my characters.

Arms for Programmers

I designed my characters’ arms to be relatively simple. They consisted of two “nodes”, a shoulder and a hand – basically two points which the arm had to go through. My “floating hands” engine already gave me the framework for the hand node – how it moved when rotating or swinging a weapon, and so on – so I duplicated this for the shoulder node and tweaked it slightly.

Now each character had its own four nodes – two shoulder nodes and two hand nodes which moved with each character. So far, so good.

Then came the tricky part. I made up some quick generic arm sprites which were about the right length and shape, and – using a lot of trial and error – worked out how to rotate each arm sprite to always pass through the hand and shoulder nodes. The system I ended up with used the shoulder node as an immobile “pivot”, and rotated the arm sprite so that it always pointed from shoulder to hand.

It sounds simple (and it is, actually), but it was a bit tricky to implement in practice. One of the difficulties I faced was trying to get rid of unsightly, “sticking-out” pixels caused by very slight rotation of the arms in the resting position. (Rather than try and fix this using code, I ended up modifying the arm sprites slightly so slight rotation wouldn’t cause those sticking-out pixels.)

Note that sticking-out pixel on the player’s left arm.

While testing things out, I placed the player in a test room and moved his arms around in almost every imaginable way, just to check that everything looked okay. Which it did, in the end:

I’ve highlighted the hand and shoulder nodes in this one so you can see how this system works.

Considering that this was all done using code rather than actual sprites, I was fairly happy with the end result. Of course, I could have made it look much better by making some actual sprites for each arm, but as I mentioned before, that was a bit beyond my abilities. At least it’s better than having to put up with floating hands!