Game Journal #42 - The Journey

I spent the entirety of this week processing and exporting all the new art assets I'd been working on so I didn't have time to draw anything new. After everything was exported I checked my files and saw that I've drawn close to 1,300 frames of character animation so far!  So I thought this week I'd share some of the thought process and math behind how I'm drawing this game and how I wind up at such a number.

When I started working on this game I settled on a base unit of time I would build all my actions around, and that was five frames of animation. Five frames was enough that I could use smears to make actions look dynamic without killing myself tweening everything into fine granularity, and gave me the breathing room to make actions faster if I need to.  So five is our basic building block for character animation in this game.

Basic attack combos- the one-two-three hit swings you get for mashing out the attack button- were one of the first things I drew. Each character is built from a base set of frame data, where each attack is five frames and the third hit in the combo has an extra recovery frame, so that's 5+5+5+1=16 animation frames for an attack combo.  Each character also has both a melee and a ranged weapon, so anything I draw I need to draw a second version of for their other weapon state, so 16*2=32 attack frames per character. Multiply that by four playable characters and that's 128 animation frames just for the characters' core attacks, which is almost exactly one tenth of our animation frame total listed above. Switching weapons is a five frame action as well, to keep the timing consistent with attacks so a player can maintain a rhythm without having to learn a new timing between weapons.

A character's walk cycle was also one of the first things I drew, as moving and hitting things are the most central function of the game.  When I design a walk cycle I give each leg four frames of ground movement- one extended forward, one planted on the ground at the front half of the character, one on the ground behind them and one peeling or rolling off the ground in their wake. During the other leg's cycle I draw that leg pulling back towards the front again in anticipation of the extended-forward frame. The way each character walks is a reflection of their personality, like since Lizzie moves a bit quicker than everyone else I give her a lot more movement below the knee to simulate a quick-paced trot:

Where in contrast Lou has a much more leisurely saunter that swings his whole hips into each step.  He walks the same speed as everyone else, but he doesn't walk as fast as Lizzie so his animation reflects this:

So a walk cycle is eight frames. When you walk sideways, down or on a down angle you use the sideways animation, but if you walk up or on an upward angle there's a second animation cycle the game switches to, to give the character the sense that they're moving in 3D space in the game field.  This cycle is also eight frames:

That's 16 frames of walking per character per weapon to create a good sense of grounded movement in space.  We take 16*2 weapons = 32 walk frames per character, times four characters is another 128 animation frame chunk of our total! We can walk and hit things and we've got one fifth of our 1300 animation frame total accounted for.

In addition to walking characters also have a run cycle. This one is also eight frames, but to emphasize the speed each frame lasts a shorter time on-screen, and the motion is more dramatic.  The forward-reaching leg extends further beyond the character's shadow oval and extends behind them a lot further as well to simulate the idea that they're covering more ground in each moment.

Unlike walk cycles there's no need for separate up-angled frames, so we just have 8*2=16 frames per character to run.  As you can see above, characters also have a dash attack to do at the end of their run. These are big, hard-hitting moves so they have a bit more startup and a bunch more recovery frames compared to the base 5-frame attack, to help balance out their power.  A dash attack is 12 frames and there's one for each weapon, so (12*2)+16=40 frames of run-related activity per character, times four characters is 160 frames of animation. If we take our 256 frames of walking and hitting things and add 160 frames of running and run-hitting we bring our total up to 416 animation frames for the most fundamental aspects of a four-player game, or a little less than a third of our current total animation frames!  And that's not the only things a player can do:

As you can see, the frame count for animating characters can spiral out of hand pretty quickly.  Fortunately player characters carry the bulk of complexity, and enemy assets are comparatively much, much simpler.  Enemies don't need to do as much because they exist to be knocked down, whereas a player is going to be playing their character for (hopefully) a long time, so they need more tools to play with to keep the game fun.

This week's milestone is important for me because it means I've got all the absolute basic animation for the four playable characters finished and exported. There's no other new actions they'll need to take, there's just variant animations and fluff animation and animations for when they're on the receiving end of attacks from enemies (they need a getup cycle like the zombies still), but the core of the characters is largely drawn and done so I can finally, finally move on to other aspects of the game.  I wanted to share a bit of the math this week to help shed light on the scope of animation work that goes into a fairly simple game like this, in case any game-aspiring artists are reading, and to just show what all I've been working on these past few years.

Thanks for your patience, I'll have something new to share with you next week!