Animation Process
I’d like to chronicle the animation process that I’ve been struggling with on and off since January of ’12. I’m not an animator and basically everything I know about animation I learned for this project.
We had discussed doing a character creator for the game, so my first thoughts were “I need to animate a base, and then I can layer different sets of clothes over that base, paper-doll style”.
I had gotten to the point where I was ready to call it good in April of ’12, and made this live-preview of what we were looking at (though still not complete)
After the animation got to this point, I stopped working on it to focus on more map tiles and the way they transition into each other, GUI stuff, ideas for battle backgrounds, map objects. We had play tested the game a few times by that point. In Nov of ’12 I started to realize I hated all of this. The scale was weird, the animation looked awful, and worst of all, it was going to be a TON of work to add all the outfits to those bases.
We began flirting with the idea of scrapping the character creator all together. It was going to be too heavy an art load for one dude to do, especially when so much more game exists that has yet to be made/finished.
I was frustrated again, and began redrawing the entire set to see if I could do it better now.
It was somewhere around this point that I realized I was looking at this entire thing all wrong, and began on a new process of animating these characters that would save me a lot of time and heartache..