Game Journal #164 - Impact

Hello!  I had planned to work on the comic this week, but after I wrapped up Lou's game animations I thought I'd start on Lizzie's real quick, but then I hit a hurdle and I got kinda stuck in to solving a fun design problem, so that's what I focused on this week.  I feel bad about not having a comic update today, so this week's game report is open for comic subscribers to read as well.  I swear I'll progress the comic this coming week, but I've more or less hit the milestone I wanted to so I'm happy to have put the time in.  

When I left off last week I had Lou's core attack combo almost entirely wrapped up, I just had to knock out the effects for his last hit.  I'd been working for the past few weeks on how to create attack effects that look good, and the formula I landed on works great for swinging arcs, but Lou's last attack is a big forward punch, so it took some thinking on how to do it right.

Pow!  Instead of a big arc Lou leaves a bit fist in the space in front of him to help convey the size of the final attack.  The big swing arcs kick up big poofy dust clouds, but I felt like a big punch wouldn't do something like this, so for the dust effects I gave it two distinct elements. The first is the regular dust cloud on the ground; where the force of the swing arcs push air down and kick dust up I imagined the force of the punch as like a growing sphere in front of Lou, so imagining this spherical blast wave expand I tried to visualize how it would kick dust up off the ground, and that sort of horseshoe shape emerging from scraps of dust on the ground is how I see it expanding to reach the floor.  I have a bit of a concern that the wave effect isn't big enough for a last hit, but I think in the interest of not Overdoing It I'm going to leave it how it is and move on.

The second piece of the dust effect is the blast ring around Lou's arm.  This is an important detail because I have plans for some other moves to involve dust rings and this is a good way to practice animating that kind of effect.  Since effects don't use our custom color shader like players do I can just bake color changes directly into them, which I tried with a gold energy circle turning into a whispy smoke ring.  The way I approached animating the smoke ring dissipating was to stretch it out for a few frames and then begin drawing the ring as long skinny S shapes, which you can see in the art at the header of this topic.  The S method really helps capture the way I think smoke or dust thins out and dissipates, so I'm happy for a good result.  I'm ready to apply this trick to some aerial moves later on.

And then there's the fist.  I did a bit of tinkering with this element since it was originally a quick blast around Lou's hand, it felt like it wasn't impactful enough if it faded too quickly so I extended its duration.  The trick then was how to make sure it doesn't read like it's an active hitbox the entire time while it's fading out past the move's active frames and the solution to -that- ended up being "make the hand do a thumbs up when its not doing damage anymore".  I ended up posting this bit on Twitter and basically everyone I showed it to loved the thumbs-up, so I think it was a successful bit of Lou characterization.  

Now, part of what got me all excited about animating this week is this:  Lou is the melee specialist whose purview is Attacking Very Quickly, dealing a fast flurry of blows to such a degree that I end up abstracting it into an actual cyclone of hits.  Contrasting this is Lizzie, everyone's favorite little pacifist pugilist.  Lizzie's purview is attacking at normal speed but hitting Very Hard with each of her slower attacks.  So coming off of Lou's high-speed technique I got to start animating sledgehammer blows.  This is part of why I am without a comic update today, the other part will come up later on down the article.  So let's take a look at Lizzie's moves.

Here is Lizzie's jab.  As mentioned in a previous article Lizzie's art is some of the oldest in the game so it sometimes needs some special attention now that I'm a more capable animator than I was when I started this project.  This move, however, wasn't her original jab, it's a remake I made later on so it's a bit nicer than the other two frames of her three-hit combo.  Very little about this pencil sketch needed to be changed, but in the process of colorizing it I did make an effort to try and emphasize the force of her swing.  In order to convey the impact I want she can't just swing the mop, the force comes from her legs and travels up her torso, the torque drawn in the creases in her shirt as she rotates her hips and her shoulders.  I need the art to make it feel like you're getting clonked in the side of the head because unlike Lou's speed, this needs to be strong.

"Block This Overhead".  Attack 2 was mostly okay but this is still an old animation so it ended up needing a bit of revision.  In the original drawing on the left I wasn't happy with her arm placement or how she was swinging the mop around herself.  I think I ended up overwriting a crucial pose to convey this change so I pulled up an older copy of the file to show what I mean here:

In the original art this swing kinda just held the mop and rotated it around the body like so, and the change I made was to pull  the arms more towards the center of Lizzie's rotational axis to emphasize the force of the swing.  Looking at her belt details her hips turn before the swing comes down because she's putting her whole body into it, and it helps make the hit nice and meaty.  I pulled her head back and rotated her upper torso as well, you can see this difference in the angle of her hood around her collarbones.  

Additionally, this is the first attack smear using the colors from the metal head of her weapon, so I thought up some shorthand on how to convey the shape of the smear and the rust patches in motion, abstracting the rust down to some red lines and using my lights and shadows to make some rough shapes of the mop head in the smear.  

Now, when I mentioned earlier about being quagmired in solving an art problem this week, such that I didn't get to make progress on the comic, this next animation is what I meant.  Oh this one gave me fits.

I haven't gotten to the last shading phase on these assets yet but even still you can see there was a huge difference between the pencils and the colored version.  So, here comes a story!

When I originally did these pencil sprites the fact that they were all just white with grey lines meant a lot of little details could get fudged and it looked visually okay.  The idea for this animation was that Lizzie steps forward from the end of her previous move to golf swing the mop up as her followup, letting it swing far behind herself.  This was the core idea I wanted to keep, but in my original drawing when I drew her followthrough I ended up reversing the grip on her hands on the mop.  In my first attempt at this animation I thought I'd keep it pretty much how I originally drew it but just reverse the hand order of the last frames and call it done.  That came out like this:

With the mop ending in a vertical pose her arms crossing over each other looks like she's going to break a bone, like it's just a knot of arms.  The pose as I drew it also ends up looking weightless and without impact, and especially after the considerations of the previous two moves ending on this one felt weak.  Which means, I got to this point and realized I needed to basically rebuild 70% of the animation.  Some of those fixes included:
- Adjusting the way she carries her weight on her legs.  Instead of just sliding a leg forward and pivoting she puts a foot down and forces her swing upwards, to emphasize the direction of her attack.  I also pulled her back foot inward to help stabilize her stance.
- Rebuilding her torso to convey the momentum of the swing.  She's not just turning and swinging, she dips a bit low, puts her body into it and swings the mop upward.  The original pose having her torso basically go like / / was unsalvageable, I needed to completely redraw it.
- Fix her arms.  The arm pose in the original was the first problem I needed to fix so I had to find a way to visualize what I wanted correctly.  In her new arm poses she brings the mop lower to the ground to connect into the big arc more clearly, and on the followthrough rather than end with the mop vertical it comes to rest over her shoulder.  I ended up referencing golfer stroke followthroughs to try to get this right.  I had some trouble visualizing her arms being in front of her with her back to the camera on the followthrough but ended up kinda fudging it for clarity sake, pulling her arms out to either side to imply what I wanted more clearly than trying to draw it literally.  The bright orange sleeves over her dark brown workshirt is a part of her visual design so when she is swinging her mop her arm movements translate more clearly by being brighter colors, so I thought the solution here was just make bright shapes that do what I want.  
- Correcting her overall proportions.  In the original sketch she ended up kinda smaller than her other animation poses so I needed to rebuild the swing to make sure her proportions blended back into her idle pose correctly.  With her back to the camera and her lower jaw hidden in front of her shoulders that ended up being trickier than I anticipated.
- Alter the swing smear itself.  I wanted to keep as much of the swing arc as I could, but the way this design came out it goes: attack 1 is the wood handle smear, attack 2 is the metal head smear, attack 3 is the metal head with wood handle smear, conveying the escalating damage each swing does. One of the changes I made here was to widen the wood handle smears to help them feel like they're moving faster, and to give more weight to the arc in comparison to attack 2.

So, that's where I got kinda stuck in this week.  I got basically everything I wanted done, and the finished combo looks like this now:

I'm really happy with the three-dimensional feel of these attacks.  Compared to Lou's swinging, Lizzie's slower twists and torque give a lot more opportunity for slight 3D rotations and pivots, and I feel like this colorization conveys my intentions with her original 3-hit combo drawing, even if it didn't all end up being a literal version of what I had drawn in pencil.  I think it needs that last bit of shading to really cap it off, but this is what I got done this week. It's almost there.

 This week I plan to focus almost entirely on working on the comic page.  Tonight I'm probably going to finish up the shading on the above animation but after that it's all comics until that's done, and then I can add the effects pass afterwards.  Sorry for the delays on that, but I hope you enjoy this look into the animation side of the project this week.  Until next time, have a nice weekend.