Animating so far for a game has been a lot different from what I was expecting. I and other team members have run into some problems in terms of our game design peers importing our animations into Unreal. Our game design peers keep running into an issue when they import our animations; they appear massive and they can’t change the size so it’s an issue we’re currently figuring out.
but so far I’ve done 3 animations for class and I feel I’m getting better with time.
We’ve decided to add a notes system to the game to uncover the “lore” of the game as an extra layer to keep it fun.
This is an example of them (this is Katy’s art), but I got her to send me just the background for my animation so I can use the colours and effects.
So I made a little note-bobbing animation for the game so they can place it around in the levels and it worked the first time in the game, which was really nice but this didn’t work out later on with my other animations.
Originally I was only going to take 3 characters to animate: Milo the Mole, the Beetle, and Corvus the Crow, but since I decided to just focus on animating and making assets because I had real difficulty making the environment, and Katy and I agreed I could take on some of her animations so she can do more environments and assets, I took on the squirrel enemy animation.
For Milo, I first started on the idle animation and made 2 separate ones for the team to choose from in 2 different software programs.
This was the first one I did, which I used ToonSquid for but I was mostly using this animation for practice on how to draw Milo, but I decided to go ahead and make another one that looked more like Milo was breathing because this one just looks like he’s wiggling his arms.
Originally these animation lines were thinner, but after sending through the two animations and getting feedback from Darragh, I made the lines a bit thicker.
After this I started to work on how to animate the digging animation that’s needed for the game. Originally I was having a lot of trouble figuring out how to have Fennec hold Milo because a lot of the positions I was trying were just awkward but eventually I did this sketchy animation where Fennec holds Milo over the shoulder.
I really liked this animation I thought it was very cute and fun but after sending it in for feedback:
So after this I went back and came up with this animation
This animation ended up being used for the game so after this one was done, I just had to do an animation of Milo jumping back into Fennec’s pocket.
After finishing Milo’s animations, I moved on to the Beetle. The Beetles’ walk is something I thought about a lot because I was wondering how to make it walk originally; I thought about a walk like the geese from ‘Aristocats’.
This would have been a really interesting way to animate the beetle, but I was very conscious that we were trying to get as much done as possible for the playtesting coming up, so I just referenced Richard Williams’ walk cycle.
I added the antenna moving and the pincers so that the player has to jump on them or hit them before the beetle gets to them, like Goombas from Mario.
After this I started on the death animation, and for this I wanted to try and make it more of a choppy animation style that we were going for, so I decided to try to use more smear frames to get this effect, so I tried using Procreate’s motion blur tool to create a blurry, choppy effect.
I wasn’t pleased with this animation; it felt slow and choppy in a bad way so I went back to the drawing board and came back with this animation.
I think this second animation looks much better, as there’s more knockback and after struggling a little, it fades away.
The next animation I created was for one of the squirrel types we’d have, a squirrel that the player couldn’t reach and would throw acorns at.
originally I was trying out the same method I used on the beetle with the squirrel with the motion blur tool
After talking with Rachel, I took on her advice and reapproached this animation because there wasn’t much anticipation or character showing through so I referenced the journal entry made by Katy and tried to pull more character out of this animation.
While animating it, I was referencing my own hand moving it back to get a better feel of the movement, and I really like this second animation where I use more frames to get more character and fun into the animation, also using smear frames to get that more choppy feel.
Soon after this I started working on the crow since it was probably the most important character for me to animate.
The first animation I decided to tackle for the crow was a combination of the screech attack and the anticipation for the flying animation. I started by finding a video to reference and watching it a few times in slow motion to make sure I could see each key movement.
After this I took a few frames out to give it a more choppy feel.
Taking the final frame from this animation, I started on the actual takeoff/flying animation.
I’m so proud of how this animation turned out. I was incredibly nervous coming up to animating the crow but I feel this animation turned out really well. I also had a tonne of fun animating it, as I referenced two different flying charts and it was really cool seeing the whole animation come together really well.
After a while we started to get closer to the deadline and I started to panic and crunch really bad. I did a damage/death animation and an idle animation that i’m not particularly proud of but the game’s design really needed these animations.
I really would love to have another go at these animations because I had quite big ideas but it just didn’t work out.