Below is a screenshot of the concept of how the battle animations will look.
I’m taking alot of time to get this part exactly as I want it because I want the appearance of these battle animations to be a strong part of the games identity. Animation is also the part that I enjoy doing the most.
Just from generating the above concept I realized a number of additional factors and things that need to be done to get this where I want it. The most important point of the battle animation is to create a sense of anticipation. Battle animations can be turned off of course because it is a cinematic experience that is fairly separate from gameplay. To create that sense of anticipation I realized I should not have characters start off in a bland neutral idle pose, but have a sort of weapon garnishing type animation to create a feeling of intent.
I’m hoping to demonstrate the appearance of that in the coming weeks but I’ll just talk about the idea now. Before a unit actually hits another visually there will be a slight frame freeze to create the feeling of anticipation, because 3 different things could happen, hit, miss or block, and the blocking sequence in terms of a time is a much longer occurrence which would be jarring to happen with out any pauses.
The camera needs to be specially programmed for zoom ins of these freeze frame moments so I will have to keep in mind the size of the backgrounds I create to accomodate a large range of zooms.
Also I have to create dynamic shadows for the 2D sprites, which in theory shouldn’t be that hard of a programming task. I’ll attempt to just create a mirrored clone with a black transparent shader applied to it.
Here’s a repost of some of the art for the character Jill to demonstrate how the original concept art turned into the map sprite, dialogue portraite and battle sprite.
Thanks for reading.
To Reverie 