This week was spent working on alot of non-visual stuff, taking a bit of a break from finishing the rest of the battle animations in the prototype scene. Refined alot of programming stuff with the camera and miscellaneous areas that keep changing as I keep changing my mind on game mechanics. Below is a sketch for the one of the main characters which involved studying what horses look like. I then took some of that knowledge and made a prototype horse run animation. This running animation is probably going to be reused for almost all mounted characters, with some minor differences in what the horse is wearing. Still the biggest short-term priority is finishing one set of animations for an enemy battle character to keep slowly building my way to making a good-looking and robust battle scene.

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Below is a clip of the tuned up battle animation scene with the camera and backjump animation. I’m happy how it’s turned out for now and I’ll be finishing the rest of the animations so that I can add more camera features and finally hammer down a dynamic battle scene holder. The UI is also very incomplete and will require more though to display the necessary info expected of % based srpgs.

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Unfortunately I wasn’t able to finish the backjump animation in time but just for the sake of the post I’ll post the uncleaned form. After this animation is finished I’ll be able to figure out what I want to do for the Camera and physics programming. It’s important for the camera to always keep the 2 primary actors within frame in any given battle animation engagement. The distance of the backjump has to also be calculated so that the attacking character returns to the same or at least reasonable initial position.

Small note, had to include a re-sheathe in the backjump so that this character can return to its idle animation with continuity.

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Below is the rough of a character backjump. I’ve decided that most characters will have a back jump animation so that they can return to their pre-attack position during the battlephase. Some characters will simply run back. Next week will be coloring and finishing this animation and hopefully doing some of the programming for how characters will always return to their proper position.

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The goal this week was supposed to finish off the animations for Regan, but I didn’t manage to think of any idea’s that I ended up liking, so I just moved on to other stuff like the rough run below. The most immediate small term goal is to get a complete set of animations for 1 playable character and 1 enemy so I can finish and polish off the programming for the battle sequence. I’ll definitely take my time thinking about the details of the animations so I don’t run into resource issues in the long-run and end up with a bunch of animations I won’t use.

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Last week there wasn’t an update just due to holiday stuff and not finding enough time. This week was a lot of future planning and a few art assets that were done. Below is the battle animation bloodsplatter. Other than that not much to show or talk about this week.

The battle animation sequence is made up of a lot of small moving parts that need to fit together and once I have samples of all the types of animations I can start really refining the camera programming portion of it.

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Not much this week because of christmas stuff. A slight continuation of the development of battle system. Going add some blood effects then get started on more animations for the characters in the scene.

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Some animation art for another character:

Now that I sort of am happy with the general appearance with the character battle avatars, there’s alot of considerations to review. Something important I realized is that the environment backgrounds need to be designed to frame the characters properly. The mountain background I made will have to be redone because it doesn’t take that into consideration. The massive contrast in the snow and the sky creates a focal point ton the mountain that is undesirable and its overall brightness is sort of just hard to look at. The emphasis should be on the characters and the environments should be designed to make the characters “pop”.

This week is finishing up some animations and finalizing the UI design for the battle screen. There’s alot that can be accomplished here, as I’ve felt that there’s always been alot to be desired for these classic style jrpg uis.

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Below is a clip of what the brandish sequence I was talking about preparing last week. The attack animation is in progress and then I’ll have to do the idle for the first enemy unit and it’s stagger animation. Once that’s done I can start the programming for the camera follows and the hitbox colliders.

These are the raw animations that took basically this entire month to get right. Due to a combination of simplicity of colors and process, I think they embody the final look of the what I want the appearance of the game to be, despite being the first things I’ve ever animated and I’m definitely still a complete novice. But then again I might change my mind again and just do redo everything =/.

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It’s been a slow week of just animation practice so there’s nothing really to show, but I’ll just talk about some of the intent behind the animation design. So how the sequence works is that before a unit attacks, an animation plays which is usually them unsheathing their weapon, than they transition into their running animation before a collider triggers their attack animation with the intended target. Then there needs to be an animation for them to return their original position which will probably be a backwards jump. So in total, every character needs 9 animations:
Idle
Normal Unsheathe
Critical Unsheathe
Normal attack
Critical attack
Leap back
Block
Damage flinch
Death

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