Early Research into Animation Tools

When the project began, we were initially planning on working with HTML5. Since it was relatively new, we were unfamiliar with the tools required to create working animations that we could use in an HTML5 application. We found several tools that claimed to work with HTML5 animation, but most of them had little to no useable interface, and we had been hoping for some level of user-friendliness.

Two of the tools stood out from the rest; Adobe Edge and Sencha Animator. Both seemed to have a user-friendly interface and both were established brand names within the animation community, and both seemed like they could do what we needed them to.

Adobe Edge was the first tool we looked at. Since it was designed to be very similar to the familiar tool Adobe Flash, it seemed like a logical choice. Upon further inspection we found that it was limited in terms of the effects and animation capabilities available within the program, which could hinder the overall quality of our final product. In addition, Adobe Edge was still in experimental stages, meaning it could be drastically altered at any time without notice. This could've led to many headaches and possibly weeks of wasted work, so we scrapped the idea of using it as our tool of choice.

Sencha Animator was our second choice. Its interface was slightly less intuitive than Adobe Edge's, but we found that it had far more effects and animation capabilities than Adobe's product. We ran into problems when we attempted to export the animations, which could only be done via style sheets in CSS3, and we couldn't find a way to manipulate them in response to user input like what is needed for a game.

The final option was procedural animation, meaning the creation of a series of static images that would be put together into an animation by the code. This method was unfavorable for both the art and the tech team, and it meant that a lot of time for both teams would be used up dealing with optimizing or tweaking the animations after they were made. Because we didn't know how difficult it would be to optimize the performance of the animations, this method was a big question mark in terms of the amount of work required to make the game.