Animations are so nice. Boy, and I thought just lighting added a lot.

Things in Fingeance are really shaping up nicely. Thanks everyone for your feedback and input, we have added so much because of it. The last few days before our last major update we have been bug fixes and updateing. But I was finally able to move back to the art side of the game and work on making some animations for various things in the game, particularly menus.

Now this isn’t “frame-by-frame” animation, I haven’t worked on that (yet). This is key frame animation, where basically I create points in an animation and the computer fills in the gaps. For example if there was a character who I wanted to raise their hands, instead of drawing every frame of the character raising their hand I would make key frames (hence the name), like the hands by their side and their hands actually raised. The computer would fill in the gaps. I have had so much fun working on them.

The Little Things Matter

The entire time I was working all of the animations I had that in mind “The little things matter…” the things that no one consciously thinks about when viewing animations. Now, I am no animator, I haven’t really done much animation in the past but it has always interested me. I have in the past done some animation work for other games, but my greatest endeavor in it was in a PS1 game called Fighter Maker (which isn’t easy still). So I dove right in. Rather than talk about each thing that I changed, why not just show you (GIFs incoming!):

Animations Add Polish

So I won’t talk about the animation for too long, but I just wanted to mention a few things I am really proud of.

Pause Menu

The pause menu originally looked basically the way that I wanted it. In the end I really like how well it turned out with how the menu slides in and it seems like it would naturally do that.

Continue

The continue screen is probably the animation that I am most proud of. The old menu doesn’t hold a candle to the way the new one looks. Not only that but there is an option to leave the game in the new one.

Old Continue Menu

So there are the new menu animations that I added in the latest demo release. What do you think about them? You can check them out in context by going to the Fingeance landing page and trying out the demo.