Game Journal #29 - Show Off Your Moves (Patreon)

I was very pleased with how much work I got done this work stretch!  A bit of this is bleedover from last week but I wanted to present the sprites all at once. I'll go top to bottom and explain all my thoughts on what I'm building here, but I basically drew all of the new features for his ranged weapon mode.

As mentioned last week I got a dash cycle in for Monday, but I also added a skid and a dash attack cycle.  The skid is standard three-frame boiling- since dashing makes you go much faster the tradeoff is if you don't end the dash with any other option you get stuck in a skid for a little bit before returning to neutral, just so dashing doesn't become the de facto movement option over walking in every instance.

Designing Monday's dash attack meant creating new rules for the system, or rather adapting existing rules to fit his toolkit.  Lizzie and Alice are the "strong" attack specialists, meaning their preferred weapons have the same frame data as the default attacks but do 20% more damage per hit, and when I designed their dash attacks I made that damage value equal to the third hit of their attack combo (as an aside, the math value for a one-two-three attack sequence is [(X=X), (Y=(X/2)+X), (Z=X+Y)], or put simply that hit two is equal to 1.5x the damage of hit one and hit three is hit one plus hit two, incentivizing doing combos to get the big damage value). 

In contrast, Monday and Lou as the "fast" attack specialists do the base default attack damage, but they attack 20% faster, which is represented by having faster startup than their two-handed peers.  A mop swing from Lizzie or a carbine shot from Alice has two start-up frames, two active frames and a recovery frame, with a second recovery frame at the end of the third attack. Lou and Monday only have one startup, two active and one recovery frame, having 1/5 fewer total frames, or 20% less time spent doing moves. 

So how does this relate to the dash attack rules?  As mentioned above, Lizzie and Alice benefit from their Strong specialization in inheriting their attack power in their dash attacks.  Monday's dash attack does base hit-three damage but he has one fewer startup and one fewer recovery frames.  Where Lizzie and Alice have 11 total dash attack frames, Monday (and later, Lou) only has nine, which is 2/11 or "pretty close to 20%" that I can fudge active frame timing to even things out if I have to.

Above you can see the three dash attacks together.  They both start the dash attack at the same time but you can see Monday's comes out sooner and ends sooner.  I tried to design his rolling shots to put the big fireball in the same hitbox space Lizzie's feet and Alice's bag occupy so its dimensionally the same. I thought the quick combat roll would look cool and fit his gunslinger animation set and I hope the upward angle communicates that this isn't a long-range attack, since he's essentially shooting up into the sky. It won't spawn any bullet sprites so hopefully it reads as a melee attack, I'd like to keep it because I think it came out nice.

When I was designing back attacks for Lizzie I knew in my heart of hearts that Monday's ranged back attack was going to be the easiest of them all. It's a light attack that does base non-specialized hit-one damage but will have a bit of extra knockback to create room while also turning the character around to resume attacking in the opposite direction.  When I do the finalized sprites I want to have asymmetrical sprites- or right- and left-facing sprites- but those will be simple detail edits of the base animations, meaning whenever someone turns around they switch their weapons in their hands.  Lou has a plunger and a wrench I'll have to swap the heads on, but Monday has two identical pistols in his hands, meaning he can just point one behind himself and when he turns around it will look exactly like the same weapon in the same hand.

I like how this one came out, it makes Monday's combo look like he's managing all sides of a fight seamlessly, which fits his character well.  I might go in and edit the offhand pistol to twirl in his hand while he's doing his back attack just to add a bit of visual difference, but the turn is so quick it might not even read, I'll have to try it and see.

Next I drew Monday's punt animation.  As mentioned before, since characters all have their hands full I can't really animate them picking up and throwing objects like you could in other brawlers, but I wanted the function of letting players add velocity to mundane world objects to cause harm to their foes, so I added the kick.  Objects on the ground can be punted at opponents in a rough approximation of throwing, and I wanted these kicks to have a bit of character unique to each character.  Lizzie is a nimble former soccer striker so her animation is athletic, Alice gives things a cute sort of boot with her sneaker. Monday is the bad boy gunslinger and I try to make all his animations as cool as possible, but I felt like when it comes to punting something like a soccerball he'd kick like a dork, since "fun" is a bit outside his element.

I gave his leg a snapback animation to make it look stiff like a plank of wood, but in setting up the smear I made it much snappier than Lizzie and Alice's kicks, and I really really like how it came out. I'm probably going to have to go back and adjust one or two frames for their kicks to match the punchiness of this one while maintaining their characters. I've been developing a better understanding of animation smears as I work on this game so everything I do is the best I could do at the time, but when I gain higher insight that best becomes less than what I could have done. I try to keep tinkering to a minimum but, well, I really like how this kick came out.

And last but not least is the throw animation.  Throws take enemies in front of you and toss them behind you, letting you move the stick to choose whether to send them upward or downward or straight back (as a way to let players move enemies onto different Z-axis planes, ideally if their friends are waiting with an attack at the ready). A thrown enemy should have a hurtbox around them that does light damage but causes knockdown to enemies they hit, as a way to let you crowd control a bit, or just have some fun. I've been creative with how I animate grabs and throws for characters with their hands full but Monday's was a particular challenge.  Lizzie's ranged throw means her pistol is in one hand and her mop is in the other, so she drops her mop, grabs and throws with that hand and kicks the mop back up to her hand in the last frames.  I couldn't really do this with pistols, and my other ideas weren't looking good, but then I realized: everyone else's throw basically uses four fingers, so what if.....

I might have to do some cleanup for readability (I wanted to get this done for this post today) but Monday twirls his pistols to hold them upside-down in his hands and uses two fingers on each hand to grab and heave his opponents behind him. Boom, problem solved!  In my excitement to solve this problem I forgot I also need to draw two grab whiff animation frames, but I can do those next time.

I'm going to switch back to comic work this coming week, but I'm very happy with where Monday's sprite progress is. Half of everything done is the top of the hill, and since a couple new actions are just weapon-hand edits of what I already drew the workload moving towards Monday's sprites being game-ready is roughly halved.  

Thanks for your continued support! We couldn't do this work without you.