Snake Games News №14 (Patreon)

Greetings, our patreon comrades!

Last time our technical department reported the status. And now it’s time for the art department to do the same.

As you probably know, we need two more enemies to test the new combat. The work on them is nearly done, and you’ll be able to see them in the game itself. And for now, we want to address a particular frequently asked question.

Why don’t you animate the game characters?

We have already answered it many times. But we did it in other places, and the question is asked again and again. So, we better post an answer in the newsletter.

Why don’t we, indeed? We have a whole lot of animators in our art department (about 100% of its staff received the animator’s education).

It’s simple. Animation adds a ton of unnecessary work.

Let’s take the combat as an example.

In the newsletter header you can see the “storyboard” required for a single secondary female monster. It might look not that big and even repeating to you, but actual animation will make it much bigger. Some of you might say we’re just too lazy, and skeletal animation together with the other automatization tools makes this work not that overwhelming.

Well, then we’ll keep on whining.)

To the side you can see our heroine. Wouldn’t it be strange if the monsters are animated while she is not? Let’s try to animate her in a costume with minimum details. For example, like this.

Hm. Using limited animation, we’re getting 9 layouts. Not that many. Let’s multiple them by the number of current combat phases (block, attack, getting damage) without changing the layout number. The result is 36. 32 more than it was originally.

Is that it? Not, it’s not. As we remember, the costume has minimum details and no extra animations, e.g., hair movement or blinking. But even so, we need to add a separate movement for the shackles chain to avoid deformation. Now, let’s imagine more complex outfit blowing during attacks, swinging with the character, etc., etc.

Plus, changing weapons. We’ll have a lot of knives, all with different look in hand and different set of movements, ofc. Plus, something like this could happen: “What if Iris starts casting spells? Let’s add this phase!” And this means redrawing for the new pose all the costumes and knives that have existed in the game before we came up with the new idea.

See the amount of work growing exponentially? And not a long time ago we could’ve handled this with just 4 new images!

The same goes for the character dialog dolls. Because Iris will need to change her outfits and hairstyles all the same.

And all this work is required just to make the character twitch a bit while you’re playing.

Don’t get us wrong. We’re not lazy guys. But there is only a few of us. So, we need to concentrate our efforts on the most important sectors of the front.

Animation is beautiful. It could be already seen here and there in our game, and we’re going to add more. But choosing between it and show art, additional costumes or new monsters, we will go for the latter.

That’s how it goes.