Animations and Attacks

Animations have always been important to gameplay and our game is no exception. When we started, we generated basic animations that were shared across all of the characters. The player had a higher viewing angle, so our animations were informed by what they would look like from that angle. Since we’ve changed the angle to show more of the player model, the animations are more exposed, and we’ve been revamping the animations to make them more expressive. At the same time, we also had feedback that the character profiles were too similar to each other and we wanted to address that as well, using our animations to create unique silhouettes for each raider.

In our game, as with most fighting games, our animations inform the attacks. It’s important that the moves reflect the kind of attack we want to display in gameplay, while showing the character’s personality. This is something we’ve been able to work on with the new animations. We wanted to provide a variety of motions that reflect the range and personality of each character, while making the attacks fit with the character type. This means the speed and cooldown of each animation must meet with the requirements of gameplay and character.

The new animations have also had trails added to give the player a stronger sense of the attack flow. This adds more visual feedback to the player as to what is going on as the fighting gets more fast and frantic. To aid the player, we wanted to have a clear idea of the trajectory of each attack, so it would be easier to predict where attacks would land.

We’re going to be continually improving the animations as we develop the game, and existing animations may be tweaked and edited to fulfill different uses as we add more context specific animations. This could mean follow-up attacks that are only possible after a hit has been established, different attacks if hitting a wall, etc. We want to have as many movement and attack options as possible.

Stingray Reworked Movement:

 

Stingray Reworked Attacks:

 

This is just a start of all the animation changes. Stay tuned to see more over the coming months!

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