Devlog #31 | Final Animation Update

Between update 0.13.0 and this update 0.14.0 more than half a year has passed! But we had multiple updates inbetween, so you might already know some of the things that we worked on. In this update our focus was the art of the game. Mainly the animations and the overall design of the art.

If you prefer a video version of this you should check out this youtube video

Animation Workflows are hard

When I learned how importing 2D sprite animations in Unity works, I didn't understand. It is such a slow process in which people do everything manually. There is so much room for mistakes! I didn't want that so I created our own workflow. There is a Unity Editor extension for Aseprite files. The extension takes the file, and reads out of it. It automatically creates all the animation clips and puts them into an Animator which it creates as well. It's beautiful. It saves time. It ... didn't work for us since we use Adobe Animate. So I had to copy their homework real quick and rewrite some stuff. Since I've never done Unity Editor stuff I made tons of mistakes and it took quite some iterations to get it right.

But now the the workflow we created is done! We used it extensively. It still has some flaws which I want to fix for future projects, but for this project its working out well.

I love Animations

Like I really love them a lot. BUT they take a lot of time to make. Since we got tons of animations for this game to do, we needed a super simple design. Most things are geometric shapes with some simple weapon. No hands. No arms. With this simple design we get away with just rotating, moving and squash and stretching the shapes. Well ... mostly. Here and there we do more but that doesn't happen to often. This way we kept animation production times short and focused on making the animations good instead of complex.

This was also a gameplay design decision. There is so much going on on screen at the same time. We had to keep the art design simple or else it's to difficult to tell which enemy is which enemy and what enemy is doing what. That's the reason why no enemy has an idle animation. We tried it but it always took to much attention away. When an enemy is animated, it either is attacking or recovering from an attack. If an enemy is bright, it either is dangerous because it is or will attack. Simple.

If you want to see all the animations we made, you can check out the game or the video devlog. Meanwhile here is a list of all the things we designed and created their animations for:

The Player, All the Enemies (Swordsman, Sniper, Wolf, Spearmen, Knight, Shotgun, Loot Cockroach, Big Wolf, Spearmen Eggs, Boss Raijin and his Generator), Electric Gate and the Projectiles (Player, Enemies, Boss). Yeah that's more than 15 things we animated. Each having at least two animations. The boss and player have more than 10 each. So yeah, we made a shit ton of animations! But with the right design decision we didn't take to long to make all this art.

The Design

Making all these enemies was difficult! They had to be designed in a way that makes them easy to distinguish and yet simple. We made everything that is safe round. The gold coins, shield, loot cockroach and you are all round. In contrast to that everything dangerous is not round. Enemies that attack in close combat are squares and green. Ranged enemies are pentagons and magenta. The Wolf and Big Wolf are triangles and blue. The Spearmen is a 45 degree rotated square with his weapon at it's front. Liz call's it Unicorn because ... because it kinda is one. All these enemies are also distinguished in size and their weapon. While the Swordsman has the same shape and color as the Knight, the knight is way bigger than the swordsman. Also the weapon of the knight is gigantic and looks different from the swordsmans sword.

Special Effects

We remade the explosion animation but realized that it just doesn't fit the style of the game anymore. So we made it into a particle Effect. We decided to always make things like this particle effects. Our animations are simple and clean while our particle effects are more complex. Since player's see the explosion so often, we felt that having it be the same everytime is boring.

We worked over the dust particle effect. It's subtle and gives the background something. It used to be simple grey circles which looked boring. We turned it into red squares shaped fireflies. They glow a bit here and there and look really pretty.

Also we made tons of particle effects for attacks. For instance some boss attacks have no animation and instead just some particle effects. The Electric gate also uses particle effects. We took most of them from an Asset I bought a while back and changed them until they fit our style more. In the future we will work over them with the "All in 1 VFX" Asset we just bought.

Glow

For effects like the glow we use the "All in 1 Shader" Asset. It's amazing and allows us to use tons of shader effects, quickly create new materials and more. It's super easy to use. On runtime we change the glow value of the boss and the player, depending on their state. If they are attacking they glow, if not they don't. Inbetween the two states we lerp the glow amount to slowly fade in and out. Simple. I only came up with this way recently though. Before I took their emission map and changed the glow amounts in it manually. Which took a lot of time. Changing the spritesheet meant I hade to redo the emission map as well. Enemies still use this since I won't change their sprite sheet.

Balancing

We haven't yet taken time to balance things out. Here and there we always wanted to tweek some things and make it all make sense. But I never took a deep dive into it. This update I took some time for the damage and health stats of everything. Overall they look fine, I tweeked some a little bit here and there. For instance the dragon strike attack gives the player huge mobility but it had the same damage as Tatsumaki, which doesn't give you mobility. That didn't really make sense anymore so I changed it.

The big problem I need to tackle in future updates are the items though. I gave to many of them a percentage buff. If you stack these the buff becomes gigantic. Which I thought might either be fun or broken. Well ... I now know it's broken. Items and the Head Collection buffs I will rework in the future but for now, most stuff is well balanced.

Next up

Balancing will be a lot of work but I won't dedicate a whole update for it. I will just sneak in changed here and there. We will dedicate a whole update to effects though as they will take a lot of time and doing them in a bulk seems the best to me. But before all that we will work more on art. The hubworld is still lifeless and boring. It's mostly static stuff so we will be able to go over all this fast. But look forward to the hubworld getting a new look and more clear level design!

Thats's all folks!

As always thank you for reading, I see you in the next Devlog!