Our first Milestone! A Modular Animation System.

Since we set out to make this game, we've known the art was going to be a tricky beast. We have the classic problem: we're programmers, not artists. We might consider bringing in some outside help with the artwork later, but we want to build the entire engine without being slowed by asset creation. But this doesn't mean we don't care about the visuals - quite the opposite! I think style is one of the most important parts of any game.

We decided that some small trade-offs in the types of animations we support would gain some big wins in terms of both technical complexity and the difficulty of creating the assets. We want a game with a good visual style, but on the simpler end of the spectrum of good graphics. Here are some of the limits we're placing on the animation system to (hopefully) help guide us toward that stylized middle ground:

Pixel art over realism. Pixel art is easier to draw (we hope), but can still have plenty of style. See Superbrothers: Sword and Sworcery and Risk of Rain.

Sean was nice enough to take the first stab at drawing a character sprite. I followed his lead in drawing the weapons. I've never drawn anything decent in my life, but the dead simple shapes that pixel art enforces remove a lot of the room for error, packing tons of meaning into the smallest details. And yes, I realize now that I forgot to draw his left hand in the last animation.

No arms. Actually, no arms or legs at all, a la Rayman. It might sound silly, but it's a dead-simple way around a very tricky problem. We can animate our characters and all the different weapons and attacks separately. Just include a pixel in the weapon animation for the hand holding the weapon, and let the player's brain fill in the rest. It also means that our player can perform any actions while running in any direction - an absolute must for our top down hack-n-slash gameplay. Our sprite's lack of limbs is a feature, not a bug!

Agnostic animations can be layered on top of each other to support a wide variety of action combinations.

Separate, modular animations. This is possible thanks to the no-arms quirk mentioned above. We can have separate spritesheets for the characters, the weapons, and any other special attacks. The really cool thing is that each "layer" of animation can have its own metadata. This means different timings and bounding boxes for the players and their extras.

A four frame, evenly paced player animation with a six frame axe animation with a longer pause on the last frame.

Keep to the compass. The character sprites in the game (and other objects with faked perspective) will be animated in only the four main directions, meaning the idle / walking / running animations won't need to be drawn for the diagonals. Weapons and special attacks will be fully rotatable, tracking with the crosshair or aiming target. We feel like this is a good balance between ease of drawing and good graphics. We considered having a true top-down perspective and letting everything rotate freely, but it felt too hokey. The forced perspective we ended up going with was inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. The player is freely moving in all directions - and has the ability to attack something in all directions - without free rotation of the sprite. Besides, it would have been impossible* to do free rotation without forcing perfect top-down perspective and showing the player the tops of everyone's head for the entire game.

*Actually, we could have used a 3d model to get full rotation and keep the fake perspective, but we are keeping the project strictly 2d in an attempt to retain our sanity.