Animation for Video Games

     Blog 4: The 5 Fundamentals of Game Animation By Payton Grady After reading Chapter 4 of Game Anim, I have learned that there are five fundamentals of game animation: Feel, fluidity, readability, context, and elegance. While sketching animationsfor Link, I have carefully considered concepts such as fluidity, context, and elegance. Jonathan Cooper states the following about fluidity,  "Rather than long flowing animations, games are instead made of lots of shorter animations playing in sequence. As such, they are often stopping, starting, overlapping, and moving between them. It is a video game animator's charge to be involved in how these animations flow together so as to maintain the same fluidity put into the animations themselves" (Cooper 44). In other words, game animators have to make sure their work flows even when certain animations could be cancelled out for gameplay reasons. I implemented this factor into my Link sketches by ha...

  Blog 3: Linking Animation with Combat Physics By Payton Grady                          For my vector animation, I chose Link from the Legend of Zelda franchise. While the animation is not complete, I have made substantial progress and have still considered the 12 principles. Throughout the drawing process, I have implemented concepts such as exaggeration, animation, and secondary acti on.         The Legend of Zelda franchise in general has had several different graphic styles, but even the most realistic of them had cartoonish elements such as arms or weapons enlarging when attacking. For example, Ocarina of Time involved Link's weapons enlarging as he attacked enemies. Another Nintendo franchise, Super Mario Bros., used this aspect several times in games such as Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Galaxy. This concept is known as exaggeration, "looking to create the hyper-real, a bett...