Week 3 - Gotta Look the Part

This week, all of my time was dedicated to completing the player's attack animations. As a result, I'll go into the process behind my animations for this blog.

Making Pixels Move

As our character's design has two free-flowing parts, namely the cape and the flame on its head, animation ended up taking a good amount of time. Luckily, my time with fighting games gave me a massive library of references for attack animations, which I relied on heavily in my work.

In deciding what tools the team was going to use to animate, we settled on using Aseperite almost immediately as it was a widely-adopted pixel art tool that both me and Matthew were familiar with.

Figure 1. Image of Aseperite, our animation program of choice. Shows active keyframe in the Kindling's up aerial attack.

At the start of each animation, I would first focus on just the movement of the Kindling's body to create keyframes, leaving the free-flowing aspects for later. This allows me to apply the pose-to-pose animation principle, ensuring that the Kindling's movements make physical sense. Afterwards, I would position his sword, as it is a rigid object that mostly just follows his dominant hand.

After drawing keyframes, I would then smooth out the animation by adding in-between frames wherever needed. This would help me achieve the speed and fluidity to the motion I was aiming to convey. I would then also revisit the keyframes and apply the appropriate amount of squash and stretch to emphasize the power of the Kindling's movements.

In addition to that, I was also able to balance moves relative to one another by giving each attack its unique startup, active and recovery frames, which will help Jonathan in implementing the attacks later on.

Next come the smears, which are an integral part in making the attacks look and feel good. I would take the motion of the sword and apply an arc in between to demonstrate the motion, using the same colors as the flame on the character's head to achieve the fiery aesthetic. Smears would start as flat colored layers, before I manually blended them together to resemble a fiery slash. I would then also add follow up frames in a significantly darker palette, making it seem like the fire flashes and dissipates quickly.

Finally, it was time to round out the animation by drawing the free-flowing components. Here, I would adopt a straight-ahead approach to make the movement of these components feel like they naturally follow the character, thoroughly applying the principles of follow through and overlapping action.

The Final Products

Figure 2. Kindling up attack animation.

Figure 3. Kindling up aerial animation.

Takes inspiration from Ky Kiske's Vapor Thrust from the Guilty Gear Franchise.

Figure 4. Kindling down aerial animation.

Takes inspiration from a combination of Roy's (Fire Emblem) down air

from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate and Finn the Human's down air from Multiversus.

Figure 5. Kindling side aerial animation.

Figure 6. Kindling aerial fireball animation. This and its grounded version take inspiration from Hero's (Dragon Quest) Neutral Special from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

Figure 7. Kindling aerial spin animation.

Reflection

On reflection, I believe this week the art department has slowly been catching up to its backlog. While we are still behind in some areas, the catchup work now seems a lot more manageable.

Moving into next week, these areas will be my main focus:

- Create base illustration for Boss enemy

- Pivot back to LD and help Nathan design the starting area

That's all for this week!