Millennium

Today is the 1.50 release of Decker and one of the last times to talk about it here.

But this isn't a sad post!! There's deckmaking to be done (), and I need to talk about this seemingly minor but actually very exciting change to the zazz module.

zazz.flipbook[] is a tool for playing looping animations on your cards.

You set up your frames in one place -- in the previous version you would have the option of pointing to a whole card or to a single canvas -- and then throw a little script together to tell zazz.flipbook[] the target, source, desired speed and the number of frames. Which looks kinda like this:

on view do
 zazz.flipbook[target source 0.01 (range 6)]
 go[card]
end

This new zazz 1.1 module adds the option of using a widget to indicate the area on the card that contains your frames instead. I'll be using buttons.

If you haven't seen it yet, I recommend taking a good look at the example gif in the 1.50 devlog.

Some interesting things are going on, from my perspective:

• The frames are stored directly on the card -- but they can be anywhere on the card. And you can have as many sets of frames as you can fit on screen.
• The frames are not stored in a canvas -- so they can continue to be edited in drawing mode with the full range of tools.
• Once your target canvas, source widget and zazz.flipbook[] are set up you can look at how your animation is coming together at any time with no extra fuss.
• It is fast and painless -- especially with toolbars or keyboard shortcuts -- to switch between making changes (drawing) and seeing what they'll look like animated (interact).

I am so excited about this, you have no idea. I love zazz. But I think this has a lot of potential as a tool for preparing animations that aren't intended to stay in zazz.

• How about designing your walk animations for the path module's follower contraption?
  

• Or cycling through the expressions of a character's sprite to make sure they all match?
  

• Want to animate something with a special flourish? Whatever you do with it later, this is a nice way to test your ideas.
  _{...you spin me right round baby right round...}
  

• In a previous project, I had a big sphinx character with separate puppeteer pieces for different moving body parts -- head, paws, wings -- and a zazz.flipbook[] loop for the tail.
  

And now I'm thinking that this way of setting up animations for the different pieces while I work would help me make sure everything will fit together, and to recognize when I'm going off model.

This little guy may not be as elegant as the Big Sphinx but he's trying to show what I mean.

This is all I've made with it for now, but I think there will be more kinds of niche circumstances that this would be useful for.

All of these examples (except big Sphinx who has a different color palette) have been shoved into a small deck. All of the sprites are directly on the card, and you can doodle on them and see the animation change if you like.

I think this rocks. I would be very happy if people gave this a try, as a new tool in their deckmaking. :)

Okay, that's the part that's going on the forums later _{(after proofreading another 20 times so itch.io doesn't tell everyone how many times I've edited it)}

Sorry for any obvious errors _{I am doing my besht} Things keep coming up for me today and I just want to get it posted here for now. I'll try to add some words to the example deck too, before it hits the forums. Nothing new, just repeating relevant parts of the post.

Thank you to the deckmakers and decker-curious on cohost, It's been great.

I've talked with a few people about using the forums more -- and I know it's a little tricky because the structure of an itch.io forum doesn't seem as hospitable to casual posting as cohost has been. But I will be trying, and I hope other people will as well.

[youtuber voice] Hit that subscribe button for more Posts on the community forum.

...if you feel like it. There aren't so many posts there (yet) that it will flood your notifications, and you might find out sooner rather than later if something interesting happens.

Okay chosties, that's all. Until the next 'last big post before the end' that I feel compelled to make. If nothing else, I hope to see you some of you at the next Decker jam.