Project Terminal – Run Animation Remake

It’s beta week! I’ve started to accept how ridiculously fast the weeks are going by and have just started to go with it.

This monday we had our second playtest and I got to see my guards running in game for the first time. A few people commented on the animation feeling a bit off. I quote “when he’s running downward, it looks like he’s swimming on the floor.” They didn’t have to tell me because I saw the problem clearly and couldn’t agree more.

The old version

The reason for this problem was because of our choice of perspective; we wanted to make our characters top down for convenience while we made our level from a slight isometric-like perspective to be able to show our game world more in detail. All of us graphical artists were very uninterested in working in top down, but since it was the best perspective for out game this was the compromise we made. And this decision is basically why I’m now having to write about the remake of the running animation. That and my lack of experience in top down animation.

I let too much of the guards’ body show on the old version. I did this originally because I wanted him to lean forward a lot as he charged for the player. But I obviously didn’t really know how to do it correctly. Instead of making him lean forward from a top down perspective, I kind of changed the perspective a bit as well.

I went back into my old Photoshop document of the animation and started tweaking his body, limb by limb, to try to change the perspective at the same time as I was saving the line quality. I pulled the hat and shoulder pads of the shirt back quite a bit, I made the lower body barely visible and the legs and arms shorter. What helped me the most during this process was to just sit back from time to time, visualize what should be visible from a top down view and think in cylindrical shapes. And a lot of trial and error. At least for me, it’s easy to see if it looks correct or not, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how things should be without reference. If I were to do something similar in the future, I’d start with collecting tons of reference and make a “sketch” version to put into the game early, to see how it works.

The evolution of the Guard. I have improved! Facing down because it was our problem area.

In level. I think it looks a lot better.

So what have we learned today? Test A LOT and EARLY. It will save you precious hours. Until next week!