Hi again, it's Sunday devlog time! The new editor feature this week, as promised, is:
Playback and BPM!
It works! Yippie!!
You can now hit a pause and play button in the editor to have a song play - the feature still needs sound effects and a few visuals (which might take time, given there are some issues detecting errors during playback that need care to solve) but the feature fully works and you can throw any BPM into it, and no matter what BPM it works flawlessly.
This is thanks to a special little behavior in Flowlab called "Ease", which we'll be talking about today.
Easing!
Ease is one of, in my opinion, Flowlab's greatest strengths as an engine. All you do is open it up, plug the values you want to start and end at in, then tell a time and dictate the type of curve you want as well as if it affects the start or end. After these couples of steps, all you have to do is send a signal once and presto, it moves between those numbers!
This concept is known as "interpolation" in programming, and Ease does a great job of wrapping it in one nice little package. You can interpolate linearly, or use quadratic, bicubic, cubic, elastic, exponential, bounce, back, quartic and a couple others. They all have different ways they transition the output from the starting number to the end one, and it takes some experimentation to find which one is right for any situation.
But the thing about eases is that, because they're so intuitive, they're used a lot. Eases are used to:
Move the camera around in the level select,
Make multiple objects bounce when a BPM timer tells them to,
Animate all of the UI buttons in the game,
Handle transition effects,
And even control the slash effects that happen when you hit errors.
A lot of people like to call Encabulated Games creations "well animated" and "visually appealing", and the neat thing is that eases are actually the thing that powers a lot of that. Eases make it incredibly easy to just add animation to anything; a UI window, a particle effect, a button.. practically anything that should move, really. God bless the ease behavior!!
Next Week..
I'm moving back to college (and getting oriented) for the second half of next week, so I'm unaware how much work can get done before and after that period. The next goal is to add audio to the playback system and sound effects/visual effects when errors are hit, so we'll have to see how much of that gets done. Thanks for following the devlogs, and see you again in a week :).
-Encabulated Games