Making a Buddy
A Buddy is a set of animations, a library of sounds, and one minigame. The Buddy Maker splits those into three workspaces.
Animate
The list on the left is every animation your Buddy can play, grouped by when the cube plays it.
| Group | When it plays |
|---|---|
| Basics | Idle, and the everyday states the Buddy sits in. |
| Rotation | The cube being turned onto a different face. |
| Travel | Being carried, shaken or moved around. |
| Power | Waking up, going to sleep, running low on battery. |
| Minigame | The art the minigame itself needs. See Minigames. |
| Buttons | Reactions to the three buttons, including sound on and off. |
| Visiting | Leaving for a neighbouring cube, and arriving on one. |
Each clip has its own speed, a loop toggle, and odds. Odds matter where several clips can answer the same event: they decide how often each one gets picked, so an idle can have a rare variant.
Drawing
Double click the screen to open the editor. You get pencil, eraser, fill, line, rectangle and ellipse, with square and round brushes.
- Pixel perfect strokes stop a freehand line leaving doubled corner pixels.
- Hold shift to constrain a line to the straight and diagonal.
- Mirror draws both halves at once, which is how you get a symmetrical face without doing it twice.
- Onion skin shows up to two frames back and two forward, set independently.
- Invert and nudge act on the whole frame.
Along the header you get frames per second, the running length in milliseconds, and whether the clip loops. The length is the number to watch when the clip has to fit a minigame slot.
Reordering frames
Drag frames in the filmstrip to reorder them. Sound cues follow their frames when you do.
One thing to watch
Inserting or duplicating a frame in the middle of a clip does not currently move the later sound cues along with it, so they end up a frame out. Adding frames at the end is safe. If you do insert one, check the cues afterwards.
Importing from Aseprite
You can import an Aseprite file directly. Each frame tag in it becomes one clip, so tag your animations in Aseprite the way you want them split up here.
Sound
The cube has a piezo buzzer, so a sound is a run of square wave tone steps: a pitch and how long it holds. You draw and drag those steps on a waveform.
Cues pin a sound to a particular frame of an animation, which is how you get a footstep landing on the frame the foot lands on.
Importing a tune
You can import a recording and have BuddyMKR trace its melody into editable steps. It follows the pitch, so a hummed tune works better than a full mix.
Minigame
Pick one of five templates and tune it with its dials. The panel called Art this game uses lists exactly the clips that template needs, and clicking a card jumps you to that animation in Animate.
Each card carries a fit bar comparing your clip length against the slot it has to play in, with markers at both ends of the acceptable range, and a frame ruler underneath showing one rectangle per frame:
- Green, this frame is always reached.
- Amber, only reached before the game speeds up.
- Red and hatched, never reached. Time spent drawing it is wasted.
Fit to slot retimes the clip frames per second so it fills the widest edge of the slot, which is usually the quickest fix for a clip that is running long.
The tester plays the game inside the app so you can feel the tuning before it touches hardware.
Before you export
Run the pre-flight check. It looks for missing art the minigame needs,
clips that will not fit their slot, and anything nothing will ever
reach. Then press Ctrl and E to write the
.buddy file.