It’s good to be back to only being late a day instead of a whole week. Though of course you could also say I’m early about 5-6 days instead. Regardless, if we ignore a couple of IRL obligations still left to deal with, I’m doing a lot better compared to last week. Obviously with just a week since my last dev diary entry I haven’t been able to do a ton but I’m still satisfied with the progress of my animations. I did have to rework them a bit because I got the scaling a bit wrong so that are into my time but it wasn’t a big issue at the end of the day.

As a reminder, the animations I had completed last week were of Vanny going up and down stairs. This week I was feeling like showing off a bit so I decided to work on a variant of each animation where Vanny uses the railing to steady herself while climbing up and down. The delay I had to deal with was because I started with the up animations first, put the railing about a dozen pixels above the stairs and edited the animations to where Vanny’s hand is on it. When I moved on to the down animations though, the railing ended up being too low to the ground for Vanny’s arm to reach. As the railing is diagonal, this wasn’t an issue for the previous set of animations since the section of the railing that was in front of her (for which she’s holding on to) was up to her torso. When she’s going downstairs though, the railing section right in front of her ends up reaching down well below her waist, requiring her to have her arm extended fully down even in the frames she’s closest to the railing. I ended up having to go back and raise the railing by a few pixels and then rework the placement and angle of the arm, enough to make the downstairs animations work without making the upstairs animations seem weird instead. Overall not a difficult problem to solve by any means but certainly a bit of an annoying hassle.

On that topic, it’s finally about time I talked about my approach to animation (when it comes to the game specifically). There’s not much to say when it comes to the technical aspect of it – like the rest of my regular spritework I use FireAlpaca with the same 3-colour limit consisting of light gray, dark gray and black. Most of the animations are at 8 frames per second, though there’s a few idle breathing animations(made up of only two frames) that are as low as 3 frames per second. That speed was more of a rough estimate when I was first working on the animations and was only locked in when I imported the animations in the game. You see, when I first started working on the game I began with the sprites. This is usually not advised as it’s a better idea to program the basic mechanics like movement first and then make the sprites later so you can have an idea on how to make them so they match better with the action. Starting with the sprites first and then programming the movement later means that you have to tinker with both the animation framerate and the movement speed to make both match so that the player character doesn’t look like they’re sliding on the floor or moonwalking. The framerate also shouldn’t be too high since every frame that one of the player character’s feet touches the ground there’s a footstep sound effect playing and having them play too rapidly would be rather grating. Starting work on the sprites first was a conscious mistake on my part as my priority at the time was to figure out the visual aesthetic of the game early. I knew early on that this was going to be a gameplay-lite experience and so having the movement be figured out to a T wasn’t a priority. Still, that did end up with the somewhat adverse effect of making Vanny’s movement speed a hair slower than I’d like it to be but I’ve learned to live with it. Plus, this is supposed to be a rather slow-paced game after all.

I talked previously about how I used a bit of exaggeration when making the character sprites, making their heads big enough to have a recognizable face. The characters’ animations by comparison are relatively naturalistic, though not without some animation-y quirks of their own. I tried to keep the way characters move fairly grounded, avoiding the use of exaggerated smear frames and toning down the squash and stretch. There’s still a certain videogaminess to how characters move though which I have mixed feelings on. Firstly, certain transitionary animations like Vanny turning from left to right and vice versa don’t exist. As a result, Vanny immediately snaps to whichever direction the player points her to. Rapidly pressing the left and right buttons even cause her to flip back and forth at a speed which would knock a normal person to the ground. Other lesser examples include other characters turning their heads to look at Vanny whenever she passes by them and the microwave snapping open when you have to interact with it during the first puzzle in Vanny’s home. Ideally the full game will have animations for all of these moments but I’d be lying if I that ambition of mine isn’t rather self-indulgent. The game works perfectly fine without any of those animations and trying to add them could have detrimental effects - from taking up development time that could be used a lot better (the microwave animation in particular would be a good example of that – Vanny literally stands in front of the microwave when she opens it so an opening animation would be completely covered up) to unnecessarily drawing out gameplay (having Vanny need to take extra time whenever she has to change directions could get pretty tedious after a while). With that all said, I’d still like to have some sort of animation to make those little moments a bit less jarring but this is all pretty low on my list of priorities at the moment.

Another personal pet peeve I have with my animation style is the sort of cutout-esque way I go about making different frames. What I usually do is I make a few keyframes, copy-paste them a few times and then cut out the different parts of the sprite that are moving and shift them around to fit between the keyframes, after which I make additional corrections to make each frame still look natural. It’s a quick and decently good looking method and one I’ll probably keep using despite everything but it has left me a bit dissatisfied with some of the animations I’ve ended up making. In particular, there’s no sense of displacement of parts of the sprite that don’t move as much. Take for example Vanny’s head when moving her body. She keeps staring straight ahead(or more specifically, to the side of the player) even as she crouches down to look at something on the ground or as she walks to the left or right. This is once again a relatively small issue, a lot of sidescroller games using pixel art or even other art styles keep the head steady like that and trying to introduce more sway to it could even make the movement overanimated and go against the whole naturalistic look I’m trying to achieve. Sometimes overcorrecting for something draws more attention to the issue than just simply ignoring it, I guess. There’s still some animations I’d like to do better on in that regard though, the crouching still bothers me.

This dev diary entry ended up being more self-critical than I originally intended it to be. Animation is a pretty complex field even when it comes to pixel art and while I’ve had some experience over the years I still have a lot to learn. For the most part I’m quite satisfied with what I’ve got done for the game and I know things can only go up from here as I’m mostly finished with the more complex movement-based animations. The animations I have left to work on are smaller interaction-based ones of Vanny standing still and doing things with her hands(of course, these animations have their own set of challenges as well). I may have more to say about the game’s animations in a future blog entry though I may need to do more progress on them to have enough new things to say to hit my usual thousand word quota.

Thank you for reading this far, if you have any questions or comments I’m always happy see them and respond.