For this semester, animation students teamed up with game design studies to create a vertical slice game. The game design students were to focus on narrative design, game mechanics and level design. Animation students would focus on the art direction, the creation of assets and the animation on the project. Before the semester started, everyone filled out a form for their desired role. My role was animation and rigging, and asset creation was my secondary role. I do enjoy animation, but rigging was an aspect I needed to improve upon. I teamed up with Aveen, Finn, Alex, Mark, and Acacia from animation. The game designers in our team consisted of Conall, Ethan, Sam, Ryan and Caoimhin. The first thing we all done when we met up was to split into two smaller groups and brainstorm story ideas. Each group produced lots of stories and then pitched them to each other as the full group. Originally, we had ideas such as a prison escape game, an escape room, and a downhill snowboard game. Initially we all agreed on the snowboard game, which would encompass three different environments within one level. After our first presentation, however, it became clear that it was going the wrong direction and more thought was needed. We all had weekly meetings on discord to discuss more ideas and started to talk about a parkour, fast-paced game. We all pitched ideas about a cyberpunk style environment with neon lights illuminating the path, futuristic assets which would decorate the environment and a fast-paced time trial level. The main inspiration for this idea came from a game called Ghost Runner.
https://store.steampowered.com/agecheck/app/1139900/
https://www.gamespot.com/reviews/ghostrunner-review/1900-6417592/
For the environment we aimed to create dark, mysterious alleyways lit up only by the surrounding neon advertisements and billboards. We created a Miro board and began to throw all our ideas together on the board. Everything from environments assets, aesthetic inspiration, narrative, level design, UI, Game design, game play mechanics and animations were brainstormed. We all went away and researched other video games like the style to get a feel of what we needed.
This is a screenshot of the environment aesthetic references we had put together on Miro. From week two we all started to focus more on our roles. While other update Miro with their specific references and ideas, I started to research the animations needed. The game was based on parkour running so I went to YouTube and studied real life parkour videos. Specifically videos which featured moves I’d be animating for the game. Ethan and I talked about which moves would feature in the game such as a wall climb, landing roll, a zip-line animation, a slide and wall running. I watched various parkour videos on these sort of movements and saved them. I also looked at parkour oriented games such as Assassins Creed and Apex legends.
These are screenshots of the earliest references I had on Miro. These feature some of the videos I studied for reference. The parkour videos were really helpful because the content creators would do these moves over and over again in the video and when I set the playback speed to 0.25, I was able to see each movement and get an idea of how I would use those movements in the key frames before adding the in-between frames.
Above is an example of a reference video I used for the wall grapple. These are only two of the many stills I studied for the animation. Once I had gathered some good references I began to do some animations on a practice rig. This was important because I wanted to get started straight away and use these references, and experiment with different movements or methods for doing certain parkour movements. I wouldn’t focus on just one video for each movement. Some moves would require reference from maybe two videos. My first animation was the ground slide. For reference I used an Unreal Engine parkour slide video. I turned the playback speed to 0.25 and screenshot various frames to base my animation of.
Above are some of these frames. Once I had an idea for the main poses I then just added the in-between and made sure the timing was good enough.
Below were my interpretations of some of the main key frames:
After I had the main poses, I then just studied the video a bit further and added the in-between frames and timing. Below is the first pass at a slide animation.
This was how I did a lot of the early animation passes
I would look at various reference videos for guidance on how to pose the model for each parkour move. These were all just practice unpolished animations, as I knew when our model was rigged, I’d be doing all the animations again anyway and properly. Below are videos of the early animations I did.
In week 4 after our latest presentations, we each showed our concepts and ideas, and I displayed the early animations. At this point our Miro board was now filled with ideas and inspiration.
Mike suggested to me on week 4 to hold off on the animations until Alex had finished creating the character model and to focus on creating assets. Alex had created an asset list on Microsoft Excel so I looked at the list and picked an asset which wasn’t already assigned. A lot of the assets were being worked on at this time as we had 4 or 5 people working on assets already. I chose to do a ‘GO’ sign. I spoke to Aveen, as she had already started a sign, to get an idea of the aesthetic and to try and keep the assets looking consistent. I created a sign on Maya and then took it to Substance for textures. On Substance I added a bright emissive material to the green pat of the sign to give off the neon vibe. I had spent the majority of the week on the asset, experimenting with emissive values, textures for the sign and styles. In the end while I’m happy with how it turned out, I came to the conclusion it just didn’t fit the style of the game upon inspecting the style guide. My mistake was going ahead and doing the asset before looking at the style guide. By the end of the week, Alex had the character model finished and ready to rig so I was happy enough to file away the asset and not import into the game.
Alex sent me the file of the character model for me to begin the rigging process. I wouldn’t say rigging is one of my strongest assets in animation but I knew I could learn more about it thanks to Mike’s tutorials and some YouTube tutorials. Mike had uploaded a series of humanoid rigging videos which I studied and followed, requiring some re-watching after mistakes. I was able to build the skeleton and have all the required restraints made for the model for week 7.
Above are the early screenshots of just the skeleton. Below are images of the completed rig;
After this I was preparing to start skin weights, little did I know that the worst was yet to come.
When beginning the skin weights I noticed that certain parts of the mesh would be destroyed or break apart when moving the arms or the legs. Mainly under the armpits or the waist would separate or look broken when twisting or moving limbs.
I spoke to Alec about this and Mike who informed me that there were too many faces within the mesh that didn’t need to be there, and would need removed. It was as if Alex had created different layers to the body mesh. I spoke to Alex and they went to work on the model to remove the faces that were protruding through the model. Once I received the model back I checked and still had the same issue. Alex hadn’t completely removed all the faces and Alec had suggested merging the vertices to have a cleaner model. Rather than sending it back to Alex, who was busy on assets I decided to do it myself. I went through the whole inside of the model, deleting unnecessary faces and merging all the vertices to basically sew the model back up. This took me about a day and a half as it was very time consuming and fidgety. Below are screenshots of the fixed model in progress and the last two screenshots show the process of merging the vertices for cleanup.
After the model and skin weights were finally finished I was able to start the animations. On week 9 I worked on a jump animation, a landing roll, a run cycle, a slide, a wall climb and one of the wall runs. The landing roll, slide and wall climb were made using references I mentioned earlier in the blog so weren’t too challenging for me. The jump was new and I had to research different jumps in games and different jump sprites. In a normal animation, you have to take into consideration the anticipation of a jump, but for a game this is not the case. The anticipation and jump had to be a lot quicker for a game. What I didn’t realise at first, was that they all had to be on the spot animation. Ethan and I discussed this and the best ways of doing it. He sent me some videos to further explain it. Below are some references I used for the jump poses.
For the jump, after conversations with Ethan, I learnt that I needed to animate a jump up pose, a jump idle pose and finally a fall down animation. Then Ethan could use these in the animation blueprint to make the jump in game.
Week 10 consisted of me still working on animations with help and instruction from Ethan and Conall. I would do an animation, send the file to Ethan and he would let me know if some bits needed tweaked or if the animation needed broken up into different segments, for example the jump animation which needed exported in three parts. I also worked on an Idle animation, a double-jump animation, a walk cycle, another wall run, a button press and a zip-line animation. A lot of these animations were made using help from various references in the Miro board and other ones on YouTube. For the zip-line, I struggled at first for good references, a lot of newer games don’t show a lot of animation in zip-lining, especially Fortnite. Eventually I found a good reference on an Xbox game called ‘Grounded’.
I used this reference as a basis for my animation and looked at a couple of still images of people zip-lining for help too. Below is a quick GIF.
Below is the majority of my animations turned into GIFs:
Button Press
Double Jump
Idle Animation
Landing roll
Run Cycle
Slide
Walk cycle
Wall climb/grapple
Wall run (left wall)
Wall run (right wall).
For the wall runs I studied wall run parkour videos for help and body positioning. Below is a video I watched for reference on this:
The trickiest part was the timing of the wall run. I didn’t want the wall run to be to slow or it would kill momentum in the game, but at the same time if its too quick it may look inaccurate. I sent Ethan two versions, one slower and one quicker. The version we see in a GIF above is the preferred version. On week 12, game developers from the industry came in to play test everyone’s games. We generally had good feedback, with some advice on how to fix the mechanics for the game design group. I was able to show off some of my animations to the game testers and they really liked what I had done. They complimented the weight I had on the animations and the look of the movements. One piece of advice I was given was in regards to the wall run above. They had advised me to add more movement to the arm and hand which leans on the wall as the character runs. I had initially very little movement on it so it looked stiff and lifeless. They advised me to add more movement, even exaggerate a little to make it more believable and make it seem more alive with the animation. I appreciate this advice they gave me, and I made the appropriate adjustments. I agree that it does help the character come to life and not look so stiff.
In week 12 and week 13 I spent the majority of the time polishing animations and sending them to the games team. I relayed with Ethan mostly on how the movements should look and how to best animate them. I enjoyed doing the animations for this project. I have learnt a lot more about the human body and how it moves through analysing parkour videos and using them as reference to animate body movements. I have had so many useful references for my animations and I believe they have been crucial for me in this project.
I have kept solid conversation with the group, especially with the game designers. Ethan, who was working on the animation blueprints, has been very helpful in giving me direction with how some animations should be exported and has also been helpful in giving me suggestions, whether that be improvements in animations, or ideas for new animations. I was also happy just working independently on my animations. I’d watch the reference videos and get poses for movements and just spend the majority of the time adding the in-between poses and polishing each animation until I felt it looked accurate. Everybody always posted their progress and any updates in the discord group. Communication has been great between animation and game design students.
The hardest parts of the project for me was the skin weights for the rig and some of the more complex animations. With the complex animations, I overcame these struggles with help from the references and just putting a lot of time into perfecting the animation. The skin weights however was more difficult due to the issues with the rig which meant I had to dedicate more time just to fix the mesh of the rig before I could properly do the skin weights. I always had good support from my group members who were available if I needed help, and the lecturers who were always there to help me with any issues.
Overall I’m really happy with how the group worked together and how efficiently we all worked. Everyone worked on their individual roles and were supportive and helpful to each other. Ultimately everyone, from game designers and animators, came together to produce a great game with nice visuals, and with the communication we all had together weekly, we were able to create this game together.
This is a play through of the game;
Another video: