Bill Robinson gives us an insight into how animation curves can be used for game balancing with his Multi-Curve editor. He also introduces UIAnimSequencer - a tool to quickly add juicy transitions and animations within Unity.

1. Balancing and Juicing with Animations
Bill Robinson – Client Engineer

2. What I’m talking about...
Balancing
● Our tools for balancing
● An extra use-case for the tools
Juice
● Our tools for juicing
● “Live” demo

3. Balancing

4. Balancing
Not a philosophical talk (sorry/not sorry)
● Balancing = tweaking numbers
Moreover, I’m talking
● Balancing = tweaking numbers per level of something

7. Config - Our main tools
Spreadsheets Unity Editor tools

8. Spreadsheets - Great!
● Easy to understand
● Easy to change
● Easy to automate
● Designers can abstract

9. Unity Tools - Great!
● Direct control in game
● Easy to change
● Quick turnaround

10. Rival Kingdoms

11. Transformers: Earth Wars

13. Spreadsheets - except
So much data!
Abstractions get lost in transfer
Consider Transformers: Earth Wars
● 50 troop levels
● 4 star levels
● 100+ characters
● Multiply => 10,000s of rows

14. Meanwhile...

15. ● Steering input
Super Karts

16. ● Steering input CURVE
Super Karts

17. ● Steering input curve
○ mapping input to steering amount
● Drift curve
○ same, but while drifting
● Acceleration curve
○ simulate drag with speed
● Rubber band curve
○ distance behind : catch-up boost
● … and many more
Super Karts

18. Animation Curves

19. struct Keyframe
{
public float time;
public float value;
public float inTangent;
public float outTangent;
}

22. ● Modal
● One curve at a time
● Context
Problems

24. Use case

25. Example Use-case
“A wave-based random enemy spawner with escalating threat”
● Multiple types of enemies:
○ Reds
○ Oranges
○ Yellows
○ Greens
● Spawn random enemies in waves
○ Mostly Reds and some Oranges at the beginning
○ Mostly Greens at the end
○ Some Yellows in the middle
“… we think… until we try it, then we’ll see”

26. Weighted Random
● Pick weights for all elements (eg. Red=5, Orange=4, Yellow=2, Green=1)
● Sum up all the weights (eg. 5+4+2+1=12)
● Pick a random number up to sum
● Iterate through elements subtracting until we bust <= 0
Eg. Rolling my “d12”:
● 1-5 => Red
● 6-9 => Orange
● 10-11 => Yellow
● 12 => Green

27. Wave ->
Spawn
Weight

28. Spawn
Weight
Stacked
Wave ->

29. Spawn
Weight
Stacked
Percentage
Wave ->

30. var enemy = spawnConfig.enemies.WeightedRandom(e => e.weightingByWave.Evaluate(waveIndex));
One Line of Code
Enemy config we want
List of enemies
Custom weighted
random extension
AnimationCurve

31. ● Data drive!
○ Code / Config split essential
○ Consider size of your data
● Spreadsheets
○ Still probably your best friend
● Animation Curves
○ Pretty cool for many things
Summary - Balancing

32. Juice

33. Juicing it up - How?
Coding? HO/DOTween?
Animations?
… something else?

34. Weighted Random
●

35. Dialog Puff In

36. Progress bar tween
●

37. Want More Juice!
● Waiting for coders - bottleneck
● Creating Animation Clips - pretty awkward, laborious, error prone
○ Sensitive to hierarchy change
○ Clunky interface
○ Performance issues
There must be an easier way

38. A Request From UX
As a UI Designer or Artist I would
hereby like the ability to quickly and
easily add animations to UI
Widgets and have them play those
animation forthwith in a quick and
easy manner.
An elementary animation sequencer
would allow us the quickly
prototype these experiences and
then refine as we progress.
Sincerely

39. UIAnimSequencer
Demo

40. ...6 minutes later
Coder art… looks not bad already?

41. Summary
Facilitate Juice!

42. Super-Summary
Invest in your tools
xkcd.com/1205
False economy for creativity?

43. Questions?
Bill Robinson - @wivlaro
http://tech.spaceapegames.com
@SpaceApeGames