Ok so this past week I managed to make the Step Pet Watchface- As I had mentioned when I posted it, this was a proof of concept- it allowed me to test my idea of a watchface that interacts with your activity level throughout the day.
Now I can apply that concept to my idea- I’ve already started working on it, but here’s the idea- which I want to run by y’all for feedback.
I’m animating a simple pet, simple pixel art style, that will respond to your steps. The more steps you take through the day, the happier he gets! Now here’s the other aspect: I also made the animations (4 frames each) change throughout the day based on the time at which you reach your step milestone.
For example: reaching 2k steps at 10 am is different from reaching it at 5 pm!
For now I have a few things I’m wondering- Should I make some cute creature? Or would it be better to make the animation with some cute animal?
Heres some examples of Pixel art and simple animations I’ve worked on before:
My other questions is- Do animations still cycle even when the layer isn’t visible? If so should I play them conditionally?
Now finally I have all of the expressions for my animations set up- Could I ask you guys for help looking them over? It’s been a long time since I took on something like this in Facer, so I would like help looking it over.
I’m pretty sure animation run in the background? I haven’t really tested that. However, I would think you may have some issues with the conditionals. One thought would be to follow a standard animation tutorial for the frame sequence (check out the ones I created), then add in a conditional for the X or Y location based on the other factors (i.e. step count and overall time).
Doesn’t have to be this arrangement, they could all be out of the frame of the watch on one side (just copy and paste the conditional and update the requirements).
From my research it is the total frame count that makes a difference. Things start to slow down around 40-60 frames. But that is for quick animation with around an 8 FPS rate. You can get away with slower, it just depends on what you are trying to accomplish.
The blue line is the Facer 2.0 engine that was updated a few months back.
