Critique > Pixel Art

Platformer character animations

(1/4) > >>

NaCl:
Hello Pixelation,

I feel like I've hit a plateau with animating this character. I got animations I enjoyed, then spent time refining them and everything. I know they can be better (the animations and the character itself). I've come here to get a little guidance on taking things to the next level. It feels like I've looked at it so much that the flaws have become invisible. Here are some of the animations:



Thanks for any help!

Most Recent Animations

cels:
The slashing look very good to me. The jumping looks odd to me, and I know it's probably hard to do realistic jumping animations in games where you can jump 6 feet into the air and 4 feet forward from a standing position, but I'll leave that aside.

Unless you have a very strict limit on frames, I would make her hunch down a bit, bending her knees to launch herself upwards. Right now she just lifts into the air with no visible effort, which is odd. I'm not a big fan of the way she fall back towards the ground. Her feet are completely horizontal, which would probably hurt her heel a lot. Most people use the ball of their foot to soften the fall. She's also falling with her legs seemingly completely straight. Again, that would hurt her knees from most heights. And I don't quite like the way she extends her left leg forward. If she was doing a running jump, that would look natural. But from a standing jump, it looks odd to me. I would expect her feet to be almost directly below her, unless there was so much momentum that she would need to extend her legs forward to stay on her feet when she lands.

I have a very insignificant amount of experience with animation, so... I don't really know what I'm talking about here, to be honest.

NaCl:
Thanks for the feedback, cels.

I see what you're saying about anticipation and buildup in the jump. The problem is that in the game, the jump needs to respond immediately to the controls. Any delay makes for really unfun gameplay. I tried to compensate a little bit by having the rising frames look like she was throwing her mess up (arms and leg), and pushing off with one leg. I can see why it would look awkward.

I agree about the way she falls, it's weird. I did a quick edit that tried to bring her mass underneath her, bend her knees, and angle her feet down in anticipation of the landing. Not a big edit, but I think it looks a bit better.



As for not being experienced with animation, that's fine. I appreciate the fresh eyes looking at this. After all, the audience is not meant to be animators, but people who play video games.

cels:
Kids these days with their immediately responding controls. They've never played Prince of Persia! You had to plan your jump ten seconds in advance in order to hit the right spot. Could you control your direction once airborne? NO! Could you turn at the drop of a button? NO! Could you survive any encounter with dangerous obstacles? NO!

The falling looks much better though  ;D

PypeBros:

--- Quote ---Kids these days with their immediately responding controls. They've never played Prince of Persia!
--- End quote ---
Prince of persia had very dedicated mechanics, partly because you never use jumps to overcome spikes or avoid ennemies/thrown hazards. You've got your sword for that. If you try to inject PoP's animation into a mario/sonic/kirby/dukenukem/superprincesspeach-like gameplay, you end up (imho) with a torture engine such as Infograme's Fantasia-on-Genesis.

As part of game design, you usually decide which laws of physics you will comply to, and which one you'll allow the player to break.

As for the animation, I note that the first airbone frame is way too far away from the one on the ground, which makes your animation look like she magically got beamed mid-air.

I'd say you can compensate the lack of anticipation for the jump by a frame that shows how much energy was involved into this sudden dash-in-the-air (there's a lot of this in DragonBall comic), for instance stretching or blurring the foot that just kicked the ground so hard, but bringing all the rest of your character's mass upwards.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page