Tackling Animations Once and for All

Analyzing the brief history in my game development journey, there is one aspect which is my criptonite - animations.

The vast majority of  people who speak on game development will tell that a game has to work on its mechanics. If your game works, it should work with AAA animations or with placeholder cubes. Seeing how much this is preached across the community, I have built my mindset around trying to perfect the mechanics without bothering too much about the visual motion of the characters. This works fine for me, because personally some games that I have as inspiration are built around mechanics, rather than graphics.

The thing is: Mechanics can go far enough to make a game fun, but they cannot make a game FEEL fun.

Every time I open my project library, I face 7 different projects that I started, each one with a different idea. Many of these projects started when I reached a roadblock on the previous one, and this roadblock is always the same: I never learned how to animate, and there are not enough animations (or good enough animations) to make that game feel fun.

The Shattered Veil is the second project I ever created, and it is by far the one I spent the most time. 7 projects in my library minus 2 equals to 5 total times where I could not keep working on TSV because I was missing animations. More specifically, no matter how interesting I tried to make the enemies of the game, they never felt good to fight. I knew that if I want to make this game, I will need to learn how to make animations by myself...

Funnily enough, I got the final spark to tackle this learning journey while working on my latest project - which hopefully I will also release one day. I wanted the theme of the game to be futuristic robots in a virtual simulation, and I had no assets to work with. Thinking about options, I ended up in Sketchfab, which gave me awesome models, but with no animations. Frustrated with the idea of abandoning yet another project while absolutely loving to work on it, I decided to stop everything I was doing, and learn how to animate from the basics.

The first animations I made were a basic run and idle animation. 24 and 36 frames respectively, about 3 hours of work. Things didn't click, and I was dreading at the idea that every single animation I wanted to make would require me to study for hours to get a newbie-ish result. But I kept going... This is the point where I came across my now favorite game development/animation/everything channel, Royal Skies.

Things finally clicked. What I was doing "wrong" this whole time was to solely focus on how to make the body parts to move, instead of how to systematize animations in a way they can work on a game. Suddenly, creating animations became fun, and I understood how to apply all the concepts I learned in those 3 hours almost as second nature, to any type of animation that I wanted to make. It still takes time, but it's time spent to polish the animations, instead of time struggling to understand how everything fits into place.

If you took the time to read the previous devlog, you may remember that I was struggling to make the combat fun, and that I was holding my hopes on the idea that animations were the missing part... Well, they were.

My minotaur enemy - the test subject - is to be one of the enemies which are a step-up in terms of difficulty. I got the minotaur asset in a pack of the Unreal Engine Store with a couple stylized enemies, and for each model, there were some basic animations. I really do not want to bash on other people's work, but the standard animations were simply not cutting. So I made new ones:

It is always so cool to see what you have created put to work when you hit the play button on the engine, but there is something special about seeing characters come to life with animations you have done by hand. It's a lot of work, but the payoff is pure magic.

So with my new animations, I worked on programming the behavior of the minotaur to use them. I created a projectile that slides on the ground towards the player (which will be replaced by a ground-splitting particle effect or something like that), and programmed the jump attack to correctly launch the minotaur into the air and land on top of the player. 

Of course there is a lot of fine tuning to be done yet, hitboxes to be adjusted and AI behavior to be tweaked, but there is already a night-and-day difference between the encounter before and after the new animations:

Creating good animations is hard, and demands a lot of work, precision and polishing. However once the fundamentals clicked, it became a very rewarding task, and opened a world of possibilities of what can be done in The Shattered Veil, as well as my other projects. This chapter of my game development journey might be the hardest yet most important one yet, and I am glad I took the challenge.