Now that I’m full time again, I’ve been spending the morning’s drafting a bunch of new animations. The plan is to get a bunch of loose raw ideas out there and then to animate some of the drafts I already have, so the idea’s sit in my head and bake a bit for some revisions. Going to have my hands full balancing drafting ideas and doing brain-dead post-processing line work. Below is another incomplete rendering of one of the characters but is using pretty much the rendering techniques i’ll be using for all the characters from her on out. There’s also a draft of a berserker class unit. Thanks for reading.

I decided to put in the time to correct and refine the movement in last weeks displayed animation, as I had never had to deal with flowing parts and up-down rocking motions before. Getting the look of the horse riding animation done is a big milestone, because animation is a bulk of the work and the horse animations are about half of all the animations. The below animation is still incomplete because I haven’t come up with the costume of the character itself, but the main corrections and parts I studied were how the hair was going to flow and the placement of the feet. Definitely still missing how the hand holding the weapon will bob but I’ll figure that out in the next hour. There’s been a lack of completed visual stuff the past 2 months because next week I’ll be going full time on the game, so I’ve been logging and scheduling what work is going to get done in different months and focusing on learning and improving instead of getting things to final draft. Thanks for reading.

Below is a redone version of the mounted horse animation. I realized that I have to study up on flowing objects alot, and that the original idea was fairly lazy and needed work. There’s something very unconvincing about the riding posture still, so I’m going to be continue to study up some. I’m still drafting and refining alot of animations, I tend to have at 2 drafts for everything that I do, so that I have time to think retrospectively, and find out where I need to deliberately practice to continue to improve. Designing keyframes has been fairly intuitive so far, but I find good reference for convincing animation much harder to come by.
Thanks for reading.

No visual content this week. Been working on a number of attack animations for cavalry units, and it’s taking a while because I’m stuck on the decision to have them attack through units, or to work similarly to the FE gba games, where the horse animations return to their starting positions. I’m also playing with the idea of having them work that way as a game mechanic, where when they attack, they move to the opposite square that they attacked from. Doing this invites a huge amount of
complications, so I’m taking my time letting the ideas develop. Having cavalry units differ from foot units was a design goal at the beginning of this project, but I don’t want to go so far that it becomes confusing and unrecognizable. The above idea would basically make them only be useful if there were niche situations designed for specifically for them via the map mechanics. Going to continue to grind out these animations, until I have full sets for a number of classes and characters.

Thanks for reading.

Below are some roughs of some basic attacks for some promoted classes. The plan was to start working on some critical attack animations, but I sort of realized that doesn’t really make sense to start criticals without the basic attack because there will probably be some overlap. I have a few criticals sketched out and they end up having a ton of frames. Some of the moves take up a large area and a practical concern I’ve yet to address is if I should be letting animations operate independently from game object colliders. There will have to be a different way of trigger events occurring if I have animations that take up a massive area.

Thanks for reading.

No new visible content today. I’m still focusing on getting a completed mounted unit animation out. Doing actual animation work is slow because I’m still planning out a rigorous fulltime schedule, which is looking to be contained within a 9 month period so far.
Some of the things I’ve been working on:
-More robust save system that will be easy to patch if I decide to make changes in the future
-Designs for some battle scene backgrounds
-Armored mount sketches
-various critical attack sketches

Below is the cleaned up horse design:

The lining and the coloring of the horse is done, I’ve still got clean up to do but I just wanted to demonstrate what I’ve meant in past weeks by scaffolding. Getting the horse coloring done lets me swap out the colors in the animation which I’ll keep doing for all mounted characters to easily have some variety in there. There is a sketch for an armored mount which will probably be the only main animation I need to do. Getting the horse done, let’s me schedule out time blocks for a whole set of mounted character animations I have to do, which is going to help towards having a defined plan for when I go full time on the project again.

Thanks for reading.

No updates this week =(, been busy with other stuff. Still working on the lining of the horse.

It took a long time but finally got the horse animation ready for line work. I had thought that the anatomy was pretty rushed, and felt it was worth revisiting, because this single horse animation is going to be used essentially for all mounted units and I might as well put in extra effort for it. All mounted characters will basically be scaffolded to fit the horse, in the hopes that it cuts down on reanimating as much as possible. Next week will be lining, coloring, and planning how mounted attacks will look with the scaffolded character. Thanks for reading.

It’s been a pretty lazy week due to life stuff, and also the rider +horse animation has been a bit more challenging than expected. I’ve had to rethink what mechanics I’m keeping with regard to cavalry, because I don’t want to increase the scope of animation anymore than I have to at this point. Mounted units will probably be locked and limited, with not all characters having a mounted option.

Below is the current rough, but there’s alot of tiny moving parts that are janky that I think will probably show up in the Line phase, so I’m most likely at least redoing the horse. Thanks for reading.