Poor Koko Kornelius, not able to sunday snooze! This is a simple back story and the intro movie added to the latest free update of Lumberwhack: Defend the Wild.
This 2D animation is actually made from in-game textures and flat 3D model assets from Maya, then animated and put together in Unity3D, same way as the rest of the game. It’s played in realtime just like a game, but capped at 60fps to properly sync with other functionality.
This makes it possible to display it on tablet devices in HD without hardly adding anything to the actual file size of the mobile app. The movie you see here is much less quality, because it’s captured from inside the game and converted to a playable movie format.
Now days this is quite easy to do in Unity3D after their latest support for 2D games, sprites and texture atlases. But I started this game project far before any of those things was supported, my solution for the whole project has been flat 3D planes put together to animated skeleton characters in Maya (Skinned Meshes).
I never used any sprite animations that are typically used in 2d games, mostly because of the limited performance (draw calls etc.) and file size back when the iPhone 3 and the first iPad was the latest hot gadget :)
File size geek comparison
This might be interesting knowledge for other developers.
- IOS file size: 1MB (PVRTC texture compression, 2048x2048px)
- Android file Size: less then 1MB (ETC 4bit texture compression, 2048x2048px, universal and works on ALL Android devices)
- If used as an imported Quicktime movie: 258 MB (without lowering the quality)
- The compressed Quicktime movie on this web page: 12.3MB (lower quality)
