MYID #009 – Animation 2D

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Memories of the Young Indie Developer #009

Hi!

It was three long weeks of trying different things.

I figured out that the strength of my adventure game will be animations – that there will be a lot of them and they will be fun.

But there is a small catch – I can’t animate ? I also don’t want to burden the graphic designer (my wife) with a thousand animations, because she still has a lot of work to do with characters, items, and backgrounds.

So it looks like I have to use skeletal animations and I need to learn this ?

Disclaimer: The animations below are quick walk cycles made by a guy who can’t animate. I see that they are ugly, I see that they are crunching. It was about quickly testing several programs and choosing a tool. The next teasers will be nicer to the eye. I promise.

Unity

I started with Unity as I showed in tutorials 1 and 2. The effect was not satisfactory, and the possibilities of editing such animation are currently very small.

Krita

Then I tried Krita. The fast sketched walk cycle looked promising:

but then placing and rotating fake ‘bones’ didn’t go so well:

Frame by frame animation is very intuitive in Krita. However, my idea that the ‘layer is a bone’ and in individual frames I rotate and move layers is hard work – it was not a good idea.

Blender

Blender was next – I knew that character animation tools were incomparably better. And now there’s a cool Grease Pencil. I made a skeleton, painted a character with Grease Pencil and “breathed the spirit into it”:

The effect is quite pleasant, the work with the animation is extremely satisfying. It looks a bit worse with a rendered character – I would still have to learn lighting and rendering, but it looks promising:

Godot

In the meantime, I was sucked into Godot and Escoria a little bit.

I built a game skeleton on Escoria in a few evenings, the errors and shortcomings I managed to overcome quickly.

So I thought like this:

Maybe I could make a game on Escoria while learning Godot and fix errors and add new functionality along the way?

Mr. Anatol And The Mammoths