Game Journal #31 - He's Back! (Patreon)

I've had a very productive week since last post! After finishing up Monday, and having gone through the motions of adding new feature animations three times, I managed to get half of Lou's new sprites done in a week, which means I'm set to have him fully sprited and animated by this time next week, which puts us on a very good track to have our new demo ready for ECCC! Lou has long been a fan-favorite character, I tried to give his core animations a bit of his jolly personality but with the expanded features I have more room to let him shine in all his glory, so I tried to make him goofy and fun in just the right ways.

The first thing I did before I added any new features was I went back and gave Lou a new third melee animation.  As the fast akimbo melee character I struggled a bit with how to represent swinging with two weapons at once, and my old method was to have two smear arc frames in an attack cycle, so his old three-hit combo looked like this:

Way, way back when I tried to add some double-arm smears to make his hands look like they were moving faster than they were, which I dropped from the current sprites.  He has two bludgeons so I gave him a focus on overhead strikes, but the third hit made him look a bit too much like a windmill. Below is the new improved combo, which showcases a) the new third hit animation, b) the new snappier animation timing and c) his back attack:

A double overhead X-swing strike suits Lou's combo much better, I feel, and gives him a fun clobbery momentum rather than just being a wheel of smears.   As mentioned above, this gif also showcases his back attack! Lizzie's back attack was a kick, Alice's was a swat and Monday's was an elbow, and I wanted to keep the characters distinct. It would have been easy to just make Lou turn and swing his backhand weapon but that would kind of overlap with Alice's back attack, and it wouldn't really suit him either as a melee specialist or as Lou. I thought about a hipcheck but in five frames, with the active attack frames being 3 and 4, that makes it difficult to transition back into facing the other way seamlessly, I feel like I'd need an extra frame to really make that work.  So with this in mind I tried a spin, and it turns out it works great.  Two startup frames to rev himself up, and two active frames slowly moving in the opposite direction imply a backwards facing, and when he pops out at the end he's facing behind himself perfectly!  

The one hitch was because it was a spin a player could be led to believe its an attack that hits on all sides, which is a reading I want to avoid. The idea is too fun to discard for something less Loulike so I tried to clarify the attack direction by offsetting the weapon arm spin- it leans much farther to one side than the other, staying inside the shadow circle on the side it doesn't attack and extending beyond it on the side it does.  I'll have to keep an eye on this one to see if people aren't mistaking it for something it isn't and make adjustments accordingly, but otherwise I think Lou's core melee animation looks much better now!

Keeping with his goofy personality, I wanted Lou's dash animation to be a bit more cartoonish- he doesn't outstretch his knees quite as much and his hip/shoulder pivot is very pronounced.  Out of everyone's dash animation Lou pumps his arms the most, and the whole thing sort of builds around that. Lou is designed as a tank- having super armor on his active attack frames, a fast melee to stunlock with and a proposed special ability we'll touch on later- so when you play him I wanted it to feel like you're charging into the thick of battle ahead of your friends:

Lou's dash attack is probably the most solid-looking hit out of everyone.  There's a lot of rolling, spinning, twirling, jumping and tumbling in the other dash attacks but I wanted Lou to hit like a rock. When we're able to add enemy knockback animations this one will really shine, I think. Here's a secret: I partially designed this around the iconic Wario shoulder tackle, because that's exactly the kind of hit I wanted to illustrate. 

Lou's dash attack data is the same as Monday's, being a Fast specialist, whereas Lizzie and Alice share the same frames and strength as Strong specialists.  A thing I wanted to do with dash attacks is, despite all the different animations I draw for them, I wanted the hitboxes to read the same, so I made a little measurement gauge to use to make sure the three active frames of each attack occupy the same space, which you can see below:

The gauge is based on Lizzie's dropkick, being the first dash attack I made, and although that bicycle kick and Monday's rolling gunshots veer slightly, the art fills the hitboxes where the attack should be happening.

Speaking of kicks, Lou's is an energetic one!  It isn't the athletic strike of Lizzie's, the cute doot of Alice's or the dorky slam of Monday's; instead, Lou punts like a Charlie Brown comic, lifting himself all the way up off the ground.  

I think this one will look really nice once we add kickable objects!

Last but not least is Lou's throw.  I ran into the same problem here as I did with Monday's ranged throw- his hands are full, so how can he grab? I did some experimenting and I'm going to see how a bearhug works in practice!

Lou's melee grab animation reaches a bit further than everyone else's because I want it to look like he's reaching in and putting his arms around another sprite. This is why his back arm sort of tapers behind his forearm, since I'm not entirely sure how to make a sprite look like it's going behind another sprite from the front yet, this is my first shot to put in the works.  After the bearhug he does a suplex sort of back throw, which is an animation I haven't given anyone yet, and my hope is that it helps sell the grab concept.  The hardest part about this was transitioning from "thrown" to "neutral" in one frame- that's where that goofy noodle-arm pose at the end comes from.  In the end I think it'll work out fine, I'll make edits and adjustments as needed.

With the front half of Lou's animation out of the way, the end half should be a breeze, so I should have a completed set of sprites by next week. I'm gonna jump back to work, thanks for sticking with me!