Väinämöinen
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The first character I provided animations for was Väinämöinen. In the Finnish national epic Väinämöinen is the bard immortal. He is birthed, already an old and wise man, from a celestial being laying in the ocean and washed ashore, where he proceeds to use his magical voice to sing trees and vegetation to the world. Väinämöinen is inherently magical and he uses song to shape the world or summon objects or beings into existence. He was one of the playable characters in ‘The Runes of Kalevala’ which meant that he would require the highest amount of animations. The animations Väinämöinen required were the following: idle, walking, light attack, heavy attack, jump, fall, knockback, tired, spellcasting as well as a reaction from receiving a sword in the game. Because of this he became a template for the other human characters. Due to the fact that Väinämöinen was the first character I provided animations for in Spriter, as well as the fact that his movements would be used for the other human characters his animations were not given a lot of personality. Because we were trying to adopt the aesthetic of classical Finnish stop-motion pictures, this meant that the sprites would not be able to be stretched or scaled up or down. This led to some inconvenience when I was creating the light and heavy attack animations. Since the sprites had to remain the same scale all the time I was unable to make the character move his arm in any direction but x and y in a 2D grid. This is obvious since the characters were all two-dimensional, interacting with a 2.5D environment (the game world consisted of 2D planes in a 3D environment to create depth) but it became difficult to find proper movements for the character to illustrate his light and heavy attacks. In the end Väinämöinen was given attack animations with broad movements of his arms raising and falling to emphasize that he was delivering deadly blows with his sword. I made sure to animate his whole body for these attacks to give them proper movements to avoid the character looking stiff. I made his back bend forward and give his body weight by bending his knees as he attacked. Väinämöinen’s jump animation was split into three different animations: one for the actual jump, but also one for being in mid-air or falling, and one for landing. In order to make the character move in a way that would work fluidly between the three different animations I creation the entire movement in one animation and then proceeded to copy the key-frames for each part of the movement into their own animation timelines. I did this because we knew that the character would not necessarily be able to land before the jump animation ended. The heavy attack animations was also split into three different animations; preparation, anticipation and strike, in order for the programmers to be able to balance the speed and length of the attack.  |