Game Journal #70 - On The Mark (Patreon)

This week I went back to take another shot at Monday's victory animation, and I'm happy to report that I got exactly what I set out to achieve in the first place!  It's a bit of a bummer that I lost the first week on failed attempts but this end result was largely a result of those past failures, so if you ever feel bad about your own ideas not immediately panning out, be comforted in knowing those failures will make you stronger as well.

The first thing I did when I tried to set up this animation was pin down the emotional aesthetic I wanted for Monday.  I don't want the tie-adjusting proper business look from the last gun-twirling pose, I wanted him to be direct, down to business and not overly celebratory. I want to keep him emotionally cold but still expressive of that emotional void, so I decided to focus on what his business is: the gunslinging.  Below is mockup #1 of the animation concept:

I took the startup frames of the old gun twirl animation and built from there.  I thought to myself, drawing him holstering his pistols in his coat is kind of a pain, with his arms crossing in front of himself and pushing inward, and one of the bad things about the first attempt was his body itself didn't really move a lot, so if I made him twirl his guns while turning his back to the camera I can both get a more dynamic animation out of the pose *and* hide the tricky animation with implied gestures, a win-win.  The initial plan also had him ending in an arms-crossed pose, since I figured if he was swinging his arms inward to stuff his guns in their holsters they could continue their momentum upward into the beginning of an arm-crossing "hmph" pose, which is what I attempted above.

It turns out, when I thought drawing his arms crossed from the front would be a pain, the transition from one cross-arm pose to another, slightly-different cross-arm pose was also a pain, even from the back.  I tried drawing his hands upwards a couple different ways before tucking under his arms and none of it worked.  I decided I needed him to have another distinct pose to transition into to really sell the animation.  Also, the initial windup wasn't very impactful, so I thought to myself, I could make something better and more dynamic out of what I already have.  The second pass solved both of these problems very neatly:

This is the final animation for Monday's ranged victory pose.  My solution to the initial windup lacking energy was to make it another hold pose instead of a wind-up.  He crosses his arms to check left with his guns, and then turns to check right, to give the end of the mission a final all-clear before celebrating fits his down-to-business personality well.  The snap from one hold to the other also reflects his core gameplay strength well, which is the snappy speed of his hands while he's shooting.  I got to incorporate the pistol-twirling I originally wanted to in a way that feels really cool, so I'm very happy with how that part came out.

The pistol-holstering animation likewise ironed out very nicely.  To imply that he was actually tucking his guns into his shoulder holsters I drew some marks in a few of his frames where he is placing his pistols into their harnesses, pushing them against the back of his coat.  I use a darker shading in between the pushed-out segments to give the lighter points where the holsters push back a sense of being closer to the viewer depth-wise, which I can translate into the final sprites with fixed light and shadow values.  This implies what's going on on the front of the animation from the back and lets the viewer's eye fill in the blanks while saving me a lot of trouble drawing the action more literally.

For the final part of the animation I needed something other than crossing his arms to segue from pistol holstering into a final pose, and I decided to incorporate the concept from the first attempt's second attempt at an animation, where he blows a puff of smoke shaped like a skull.  This animation lets me shift from the snappy high-speed pose-to-pose snaps of the all-business pistol check into a slower, more leisurely pace of taking a drag from his cigarette.  This I feel is a good way for Monday to celebrate a victory, not jumping or posing but just blowing a puff of smoke.  I also felt like letting him turn towards the camera with a glance over his shoulder, face cast in shadow would capture his personality a lot better than the old tie-adjusting- he's a shady, villainous person so the shadowy glance backwards gives him the right atmosphere.  

One of the smaller details about this pose I think worked out well was the physics on his coat.  Early sprites of Monday I didn't do a great job capturing the weight of his coat as he moves, and I'll have to revisit those later, but here I tried to keep the bottom hem low and heavy but let it billow out a bit with the pivot of his body.  You can see it particularly well in the sprite sheet at the top of this article, but my intent was to "delay" the turn of the bottom crescent of his coat a few frames behind the twist of his shoulders as he's turning, and then swing it back around to the right, using the hold frame on the second gun pose to settle it back into place around his legs.  Also, an even more minor detail is for the final pose I wanted Monday to tuck his right hand into his pocket, so he's doing something with that hand to move it away from the arms-crossed pose.  To imply this I had him move his elbow back and then pivot his forearm downward, but to sell it I drew a little fold coming back and settling around his forearm at the < crook of his back on the right side, like he's pulling the coat aside to get to his pocket, to give the coat more weight and a better fabric feel.

I'm going to switch back to working on comics this week and push to get the next page finished before the end of the month, and then after that I'll be working on Monday's melee victory pose, and then after that is Lou's animations and then that will be the other side of this humongous art mountain.  Thank you for sticking with me, we are making progress slowly but surely.