Game Maker 2 is a cross-platform game engine developed by YoYo Games. It features a powerful programming language for professionals, and a drag-and-drop, no-code-required workflow for beginners, with a comprehensive toolset. Many of its new features include Real-Time Animation Editing, a new innovative workflow and seamless path from Drag & Drop to actual code.
ENTER THE AMAZING SPARKMAN
SPARCKMAN is a well-known YouTuber who has an entire channel dedicated to animated parodies, original comedy sketches, and gaming video tutorials. Recently he has created a series of YouTube tutorials, on how he creates quick 2D assets for use inside Game Maker 2 with the help of CrazyTalk Animator 3.
Now Sparckman’s tutorials are not just informative, but also short. As in under 5 minutes-short. This is possible thanks to CrazyTalk’s extensive library of pre-made content, which by the way is 100% royalty free for any game developers that wish to use them in their commercial games.
In the above tutorial (2nd tutorial) Sparckman shows us how he created a simple walking animation inside CrazyTalk Animator 3 in order to replace a previous walking cycle he made in Game Maker 2. This previous cycle was covered in his first tutorial, which can be found below.
Sparckman starts by selecting TED, one of the default characters found inside. He then applies a walking loop motion from one of the many motion library templates that come with CrazyTalk Animator 3.
Once his character is animated, he then proceeds to export his character animation as an image sequence. In this case a PNG sequence.
As mentioned, this walking cycle was created in order to replace a previous walking cycle he originally made for his FIRST tutorial. You can watch that tutorial below:
To replace the original walking cycle, Sparckman simply imported the PNG sequences. He also replaced the Idle cycle with the initial frame of the walk. Now, this is obviously to save time because he could’ve also created an entire Idle animation for his character. e.g. swaying back and forth waiting.
The next couple of steps involve properly mapping all the motion sequences to the correct stroke keys and instances. This is to have the character walk in accordance to the player movement directions.
Now that the new character and walking animations are finished, Sparckman’s final step is to create a background for his game. For this he again digs into the CrazyTalk Animator 3 default library for backgrounds.
He goes through the same simple procedure of exporting that PNG image as a background sprite. Once in Game Maker 2, he adjusts the proportions of the background behind the walking animation cycle, and voila! Done.
And that’s how you create fast 2D assets for Game Maker 2 with CrazyTalk Animator 3.
To follow more of Sparckman‘s weekly YouTube videos, visit his channel and subscribe. https://www.youtube.com/user/amazingsparckman/videos
