As outsiders correctly assume, indie game-development is a big rollercoaster of rock-and-roll awesomeness. And not at all about staying indoors while the weather is nice and fixing bugs. Not at all. For me, this week's rock-and-roll awesomeness materialized in the form of euhm several bugs that had to be squashed, while being inside. Hmm. Anyway, sometimes there is awesome stuff and rollercoasters and rock-and-roll. But today it is bugs. Glorious bug fixing. It is a well known fact amongst developers that bugs enjoy laughing in your face. However, most of the times you just know that this must be so, without actually being able to see the bug laughing at you. So when I finally encountered a bug that was literally laughing at me, I wasn't sure what to think.
The problem was that at a certain point in our Prologue, just before the boss releases a power-up its head would make a jump. Just a small one, but annoying nonetheless. I 'fixed' that by always animating the head to a 'neutral' position before playing a new animation. However, now I head the problem you can see in the gif. The head would sink before starting the next animation… I figured the reason for that *had* to be that some other animation was also adjusting the position of the head. It had to be. Their effects would combine in some sort of unholy way and cause the sinking effect. Haha, I knew what to do! It only took me an hour to carefully tracking which animations where affecting the top of the head of our boss at what time. And then another 30 minutes to come to a slow realization that there was no problem with the other animations. No unholy combination of translations. Just a simple oversight on my behalf. I calculated the translation vector for the head to move back to 'neutral', and then instead of applying that, I would animate the head towards the animation vector. To the less mathematically inclined, lets just say that makes as much sense as rotating something by a color. At least by now I understood what that evil bastard was laughing at…