Latest Update Post:
Game Engine Test! (video)
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It’s been a while since I did any serious animation so I decided to start this pet project – I’ll work on it when I have time.
Here’s what I came up with today:
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f202/bchan009/fighting%20game/ui_toy.png
Too lazy to do my own UI so I just grabbed some random garbage off google. We’ll see how far this goes.
Had a rough month at work but decided to do some animation.
Standing lk for everyone!
First draft:
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f202/bchan009/fighting%20game/2Q.jpg
Second pass:
http://i48.photobucket.com/albums/f202/bchan009/fighting%20game/bunny_lk.png
Not used to animating for games – frame count limits can be a pain in the ass. Been watching some GDC vids from Skullgirls devs to get some pointers on smooth animation using as few drawings as possible.
Been grinding this project out over the past few weeks. No real response from people here but hopefully that will change over time. Here’s my first game engine test! Still lots to do…
I can give some advice for animations: you can reduce a lot of work by rotating keyframes and using them for padding. That way you can add weight and anticipation to your attacks without a lot of work. I use asesprite to rotate my sprites, since it has an algorhythm that isn’t as destructive as regular rotations, so you have way less cleanup to do. Since you use traditional drawings rather than sprite art, that method is ideal since it requires even less touch ups.
Use cut and paste as much as possible. Most of the time you don’t need to draw frames that are closely spaced together from the ground up; take the previous frame, cut the limbs, move them around a bit and only redraw what rotates in the z axis. You’ll save a lot of time that way. Only redraw what is absolutely necessary, that’s a must when doing a solo project like this. For example Fei-Long’s neutral is animated by just moving parts around and rotating limbs instead of actually fully redrawing frames.
http://i.imgur.com/GQ8jISW.gif
Also plan out the whole animation in roughs before you get to the real thing, and only animate a design you already have set on stone. Planning might seem like extra work at first but in the long run saves you a lot of time because you won’t need to correct stuff as much, and correcting a single frame often requires fixing correlating frames so this really adds up. I see you changed some design things from the first pass to the second, and redrawing design changes takes a lot of extra work. I did that mistake when I was first starting with my project and needlessly added a lot of workload haha.
The character is well drawn and the animation looks solid even with frame economy. The design reminds me a bit of Fill-in-cafe’s games (Panzer Bandit, Mad Stalker). What are you going for in terms of playstyle and systems?
Thanks for the input and advice! I went to school for film animation so I’m not used to working with such low frame counts. I thought for this project I’d draw every inbetween by hand because I wanted to avoid the stiff look you get from copy/pasting parts of sprites to use for multiple frames.
You’re right in that changing char design as you go wastes a lot of time and effort, and usually I’ll finalize char design before animating anything, but I figured I’d mess around a bit first to get the game engine’s animation system working and to see what kind of limitations I’d have animating with so few frames. I’ve already learned quite a few things – there’s barely any time for squash and stretch/anticipation in 3 frame normals. There isn’t really much time for jump and dash startup animations either without making movement feel slow. Moves and actions that I had 4-5 frame animations for seem better served with just 1. I feel like animating @ 60fps is way less forgiving than animating at 24…there’s a bit of a learning curve.
I think this character will probably need some more design tweaks before I’m ready to really animate anything with him. These animations are actually roughs haha.
You’re right about the influences too – I’m going for a 80s mecha look, so I’m going for Appleseed/Mad Stalker/Bubblegum Crisis kind of stuff. For now all I know about systems is that it’s a 4 button fighter (SNK style) and I want it to be fast with chain combos (like Darkstalkers). Toying with the idea of Marvel style air combos but I’m not sure yet.
I’m interested to see your project! Do you have a link?
I don’t have a lot to say but I’ve been watching this pretty intently.
It will look more forceful if you tweak the anticipation pose a bit, have him bring his rear hand forward and stretch his leg out behind him. I.E. http://spritedatabase.net/files/arcade/633/Sprite/Adon.gif
While you’re talking about animations, you might get some use from this guy’s tutorials:
I’m impressed. Wish I could say more but I really can’t
