Ideas for the shoot animation states for all animation states

This post might turn into just my rambling to myself so that I don't forget what I was doing at 4 am. Or it might turn into intelligent and intriguing conversation between 9 senior video game students which then lands them all in their respective fields to pursue a long life of happiness and gratification. Who knows?

I know this post might be a tad bit late in the grand scheme of things but things are how they are and time is how it is so without further ado, lets get this shoot animation thing underway.

I was thinking of a couple different ways to go about this shoot animation transition thing. I began by thinking off all the games of yesteryear and how they handled it.

Mega Man had, what seems to me, two entirely different sets of animation. One for not shooting and one for shooting. And to transition between the two I think they just swap out the run animation at the exact frame it was on to the exact frame of the run and shoot animation. Or possibly they were always both on the screen but one one hidden so pressing the shoot button just switched the animations visibility from true to false.

Earthworm Jim had a slightly different approach. And by slightly I mean totally different.

Jeez its hard to type a coherent sentence with "It" playing in the background.

Anyways, I think Earthworm Jim basically had an animation for the legs and one for the torso. I'm not as sure about this one but it seems that the arms may have also been separate so they could aim up and kitty corner.

So basically I'm thinking of doing one of a few things.

1. Replace all existing animations for Zalien with the same clip but without the arm. Then animate a separate clip of the arm and mount it to Zalien. This seems like a more difficult approach to the problem.

2. Use the existing animations of Zalien and keep track of which frame each animation is on. Then swap to the same frame on the corresponding shoot animation. Might be tricky might not. Who knows?

3. Have both Zalien and Shoot Zalien on the stage at all times but toggle which is visible via the shoot button. They would both have the same animation state names so switching between the two shouldn't be a problem. Shouldn't. Ha. That's funny.

4. With each sale of the game we will just have the player email us what they do and then Shelby will quickly animate the scenario and email it back to them so they could in fact do ANYTHING they want and thus increase the replayability of "Time Blunders". Think "Scribblenauts" but with WAYYYYY less coding.

Keep tuned for some more updates.