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Textures are heavy. Bloat-y. They weigh down your apps, and consume memory. Sometimes you just want to efficiently animate something procedurally. One useful technique to have in your bag of tricks is that of basic skeletal animation. In this article series, I’ll run you though the basics of 2-d skeletal animation. I’ll be implementing this as part of a variant of the popular ‘run as far as you can’ games on the Android platform using AndEngine/OpenGL as the rendering back-end. Those more interested in reading code can follow along at the 5 Seconds GitHub commit history. At the end of this series, you’ll be able to implement basic skeletal animation in the language of your choice. I’ll be using Android/Java/*OpenGL as the pedagogical example, but the code should port easily to other platforms.

*Note that if you’re following along in code, you’ll see the original game engine was a basic multi-threaded game loop/render loop combo I created for this article series (any 5-seconds games using OpenGL would inherit from these base classes I cooked up).  After a few months of some awesome projects at work taking up my time, I switched it out to andEngine.  That said I’ll still be running through a bit of basic engine design.  If you’re looking to get a feel for basic Android game programming without the OpenGL and much of the multi-threaded bits, I’d recommend reading through the source code of the ‘Pop X Color Balloons’ game contained within the project. As always, you can try the code out at anytime on your own Android device because everything about it is open sourced on GitHub. Eventually I’ll make this game series available on the Play store as a compilation game (think Wario-Ware), Until then, GitHub will be the place to grab the project.

Skip Ahead:
Let’s Talk about “Boundage”
Prequel: Choosing your Draw Ordering, and The Importance of The Separation Between Game Logic and Game Graphics
Ensuring Thread Concurrency and Avoiding Deadlocks
Baby Steps: Step One: Start with an Arm is an Arm is a Leg?
Baby Steps: Step Two: Now Form The Head
Some Thoughts On Procrastination

Let’s Talk about “Boundage”

For me, it all starts with an off-the-cuff sketch on paper. This often occurs while I’m doing something else with my family. Why burn your eyes out doing design work at your laptop? A good design can be translated from sketch to mathematics on paper. When you’ve got a good solution mathematically, then you can consider the implementation details. When it’s time for coding, you’ll know it.

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While UI is often the last thing a programmer thinks about when starting on a new project, it’s often the very first thing a user knows about your project. Why then don’t we all use the latest and greatest UI patterns? Perhaps many coders find visual design to be out of their domain, or perhaps they feel that the execution of the algorithms contained within their program are of paramount concern to users. Regardless of the reason, disgruntled users have started to leave once trusted programs whose interfaces have not kept up with the times. How then to update your app(or game!) to the newest visual hotness?

In this article I’ll be taking you through the creation of a dynamic game selection screen based on the excellent ViewPagerIndicator library by Jake Wharton. As always, you can follow along in code at the 5 Seconds GitHub repository. When you finish the article, you should be able to easily implement a icon-enabled view pager for your Android app or game.

1. Open Source FTW
2. Creating your Activity
3. UI Layouts and Unobtrusive Advertising
4. Creating your Generic Fragment with Saving and Loading of State Values
5. Creating Your Adapter
6. Putting it all Together – Instantiation
7. Icing On the Cake – Title Music Loading
8. Conclusion

Read on for the full article!
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