Fighting the Frame Limit

Hello again, it’s the second blogging week.

Last week I talked about creating the death animation of our player’s first stage of growth from the ground up. I also went through a couple of animation principles and how I utilize them in my work process.

This week I’ve been working on the animations for our player’s second stage of growth, and work has not gone as smoothly as it did for the first stage because of a dreaded addition to the character design:

The unholy fishing rod.

The first and obvious problem with the fishing rod is that it simply adds more details to the character design, which creates more work as you have to be extra careful to keep everything consistent for each new animation frame. While this is a simple question of patience and attention to detail, I’ve already noticed my consistency between frames overall has gone down when compared to the first stage’s animations.

Now I’m not talking about the eye suddenly changing shape or the fin turning red for a frame, these consistency errors I’m referring to can be just a small error in judgement when going from one frame to the next that’ll mess up every frame after it. For the graphic students out there, it’s like when Steven talks about keeping the lines perfectly connected to vanishing points when working in perspective. If you get just one line slightly wrong, even if it’s just by a couple of pixels, it’ll mess up everything else. Just look at this fin here:

It gets bigger as it’s moving, doesn’t it? This happened because I got the size of the fin just slightly wrong during a frame in the middle of the animation, and since I would work off that fin for every frame after that, the entire thing went off model.

Now, this particular case isn’t too much of a big deal, and the average player will probably never pay attention to it, but it’s something that grinds my gears as a perfectionist, and this is not the only consistency problem that’s cropped up as I’ve had to juggle more details while animating this character. I’m probably going to go back over the second stage animations again over the weekend and fix some of these consistency errors.

The second problem with the unholy fishing rod is the fishing line itself. To bring up an animation principle again, when you’re working with something like a fishing line, you usually want to keep follow through in mind. As the fishing rod moves around, the line moves with it, but it’s not making an identical motion. The fishing rod, being the weightier object which the line is attached to, is dragging around the line as it moves, so the movement of the line will have a delay as it tries to follow the fishing line. Here’s a visual demonstration:

Notice how as the ball touches the ground, the line is still pointing upwards because it’s being dragged by the weight of the ball.

Here’s another demonstration of follow through in a swinging line, which is also my go-to method of animating things such as hair or cloth in motion:

Notice how the bottom of the line is further back than the top. The center of weight is at the top on the black circle, so the end of the line that’s attached to the black circle doesn’t have to be pulled as much to move as the other end of the line does. This short demonstration also utilizes slow in and slow out, which I explained in my last blog post.

Now, animating follow through isn’t too bad once you get used to it. The problem is… Adding this element to an animation will increase the amount of frames you have to draw, if you’re drawing a movement from start to finish. Frustratingly, I want to keep the frame count on our player’s animations between the two stages the same as much as possible. This is to keep things consistent, decrease the amount of work our programmers have to do, and to make sure the player’s movements are clear to the player and consistent regardless of growth stage.

Here’s the animation I struggled with the most when it comes to the fishing rod:

This is the animation that plays when you eat an enemy, it’s a longer version of the normal biting animation. This animation plays both as an indicator to the player that they’ve successfully eaten an enemy, and to add a bit of delay so that you can’t immediately move on to the next target and eat endlessly. Still, it’s still quite a short animation, at only 6 frames.

But when you add the fishing rod into the equation, this is what I’d like to do…

Now we’re at 11 frames, almost double the amount of the original animation, and to be honest I’d like to add more to smooth it out. In any case, this increase in frames creates an obvious delay that wasn’t there in the fish’s first stage which would be quite a jarring transition and would slow down the gameplay.

Obviously, I had to compensate on the movement of the line to fit it in the frame limit I want to keep. After much struggling, this is what I’ve come up with, and the animation is still unfinished as I haven’t had time to add the light bulb yet:

Still decently smooth, but I don’t like how abruptly it ends. I might have to sit on this one for quite a while yet. Wish me luck!!