Lanino and Elnina are now available as desktop buddies here, enjoy!
Lanino and Elnina desktop pets that will walk around on your computer, and interact with each other! You will need the shimeji software up a
short process overview and notes under the cut:
Thank you to those of you who voted in my last update! Hopefully the additional wait was ok, I have done my best to make the walking sprites look natural using the original sheets.
My main goal was to make something simple enough to publish by the end of May, but that would introduce me to affordances. These basically allow shimejis to interact with one another by using a sort of call and response, and I figured there was no better pair to try it with than the weather duo!
Learning this function was easier than most so far, especially since the example code kept everything related to affordances in one section. This is roughly how they work:
shimeji 'A' frequently broadcasts a word for a certain amount of time
shimeji 'B' frequently checks for broadcasts of a word
If 'A' is broadcasting and 'B' checks for the same word at the same time, then shimeji 'B' will travel to the location of shimeji 'A'
if 'B' gets to the location before 'A' stops broadcasting, an interaction is triggered
the interaction plays, and the images can be split between both shimejis, or shown on just one
the interaction will be interrupted if they are pulled them apart or if they lose contact with the floor
if the interaction is completed successfully, an optional follow-up behavior can be added.
The Shimeji discord suggested a trick to trigger the interaction at a certain distance instead of at an identical location, but I wanted to use the optional follow-up behavior and avoid variables so that might be a project for another time. To get the follow-up images to line up, I added a buffer image with changed anchors and then used offsets to smooth the transitions.
I had fun working on the weather duo, and getting targeted experience with some of the more involved functionality for shimeji. Hopefully that will come in handy because I have some larger and more exciting projects coming up, so feel free to stick around for updates!
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