Devlog #4 - Battle Animations and Minor Additions

Not much to say this week. Just lots of animating and adding moves into the game. Here’s a showcase:

(Sneaky mouse lol)

I lied, I actually do have some things to say. SFX animation is really hard! Actually all animation is hard and SFX animation might be a little easier for me personally than animating say, the walk cycle of a wolf. But when animating something real - as with drawing it - its easy to take inspiration from real life. I find animals and people much easier to draw than creatures from my imagination for this very reason and struggle with monster design. Similarly, one might imagine me struggling with organic animations. Regardless, animation is a new skill for me and it takes a lot of concentrating and trial and error for me to create something at a standard I can stomach. I think these results are fine but I would like to improve my skills further to make things that look even better!

For an interesting little tidbit: 2 out of these 6 animations had components animated via code rather than manually - is it obvious which ones? Yeah, animating lots of lines moving in a singular direction can obviously be achieved very easily with some simple code! So the lines moving toward the center in animation 3 (not the outwards moving, er “spikes I suppose you’d call them) and the outward moving lines in animation 6 were handled via code. This made the process relatively pain free! I’m also planning to do some animations dynamically, via a particle system for example. The end results should still be true to the graphic style of Frostbitten but doing them via code means I can play to my strong suits and cut down on the time it takes to complete animations - which is a lot! Although surprisingly not as much as I would have thought going into it.

Just like pixel art in general, working at relatively small resolutions takes some of the “guess work” out of the artistic process. There are only 192 x 192 positions to put pixels after all. If I want a shape to move in a particular direction, there are only so many choices I can make for that. Working at higher resolutions makes this a little muddier. But at the same time, minor mistakes are less noticeable. You could debate it. For me I prefer small resolution work! Haha.

Anyway, once all the animations are done and added in, I’m thinking of planning ahead with some new events too! I’m waiting until August before I start charging forward with level design (for reasons secret for now) so I’m mostly just trying to add as much to the game as I can without actually moving ahead in terms of playable content too much. By August I will tell you why this is but for now, look forward to some new event images next time!