Game Journal #30 - Three Down, One To Go (Patreon)

I've been busy this week. First thing's first though, I got some artwork for Glyphsong done so we can have two game demos at Emerald City Comicon. Glyphsong is a puzzle game where you use music to unlock magic spells. There are an initial eight stages, each representing a different basic spell, each corresponding to musical measures of different lengths.  This is meant to be a quick side project so I didn't want to fall down a rabbit hole of animating individual components so I designed the glyphs to "animate" as you unlock the pieces, which you can see below:

After getting those drawn and sent over to Jason I got to work finishing the last of Monday's new game sprites.  Doing the second half of a character's sprites is easy because a few of the animations are the same regardless of which weapon they're holding, so it's mostly a matter of copying what I've already drawn, erasing the hands or arms and tweaking them to match the new weapon.  Monday's melee kick, skid and dash animations were like this, the rest are all fresh.

Dash Attacks are something I decided should look different for each weapon a character has. This partly stemmed from the fact that Lizzie's first dash attack was a pole vault on her mop, which she couldn't do with her pistol out, but mostly because I think it'd look cooler and give the characters more character.  Monday's melee dash attack was initially going to be him flipping the knife upside-down in his left hand and throwing out a big sliding haymaker, but I thought his already-free hand would be a better use for this with only two startup frames.

I've tried exploring sliding-feet in Alice's dash attacks but I couldn't get them to work right, but I think it can work in this punch. It only slides briefly and then there's a step forward after the active frames where friction bites down again to sort of sell the idea of the slide.  A fun fact about all the dash attacks drawn so far: they're all designed to put hitboxes in the same spot relative to the shadow circle on all three frames in all the different animations, so while they all appear short or tall or wide or narrow or whatever else, the violence element is always occupying the same space, and that space was initially defined by where Lizzie's feet ended up in a dropkick.

I've been going through and touching up all the melee attack smears to make them snappier. Of the five visual frames the third and fourth used to be where a hitbox animation smear was printed and this made a fast motion linger on screen too long. I cut out and replaced the second half of the smear with a stretched slowdown animation but the hitbox will remain on that frame, but it makes the swings feel snappier by reducing the visual lag of having two smear arcs. 

Out of everyone's back attacks Monday's have thus far been the easiest to draw.  Melee back attacks are deliberately drawn without big smears because they're meant to be low-damage but high-pushback attacks that visually distinguish themselves from larger, more damaging attacks. Monday's knife attacks always have his free hand up in a defensive position, so a backwards jab with his elbow made sense. I tried adding a knife flip in the air to switch weapon hands, to see how it'd come out, and when I initially had the final frame catching the knife I decided to let that frame be an open palm pre-catch, allowing the first frame of the next attack to follow to be the "catch" frame.  In practice it worked out much better than I'd hoped, giving the catch a snappy feeling of flowing into the next swing:

Here you can see the above-mentioned attack smear adjustments in action. You can also see a back attack leading into melee combo 1 and 3- a horizontal and vertical swipe respectively- gives the implied catch of the knife flip two different directions. If I'd have gone with my first plan to make the final frame the knife catch I might not have achieved this effect, so that's a happy victory I'll be remembering for the future.

The last new-new animation is Monday's melee throw. This one was super easy because unlike almost all the other throw animations he isn't jugging multiple weapons, it's just a knife.  

It's slightly similar to Alice's melee throw but I wanted to make it a bit more controlled.  Monday turns and pivots back to toss his opponent, and then pivots forward again in the same direction he came from, whereas Alice leans forward and puts her whole body into heaving a dude over her shoulder and then just keeps spinning to arrive back where she was facing again:

I try to make them all as distinct as possible, but in this case I think there's really only so many ways you can pick a person up and throw them, but I'm happy with the personality distinction here.

The very last thing I drew before finishing up Monday was actually an old animation component.  Our plan was to have two frames of landing recovery after you do a divekick that can only be cancelled into ground attacks- this was meant to prevent jumping and immediately divekicking over and over again to put out a sustained recovery-free hitbox. We hadn't added the recovery frames when Monday was included in the game the first time and I guess I just forgot to draw them, so when I was zipping up all the files to export at the new higher resolution I got to my divekicks and remembered that I forgot to remember not to forget to draw these recovery frames, so there they are.

With Monday in the bag I have all of February to draw Lou, so you can look forward to a month of very fun animations in the immediate future. I've been cooking up some good ideas for him and I'm excited to finally get to draw them!

Thanks for sticking with us.