Blog 4: The 5 Fundamentals of Game Animation

    

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 having multiple stages to his jump animation. Rather than a simple jump animation, I incorporated what I call an "about to jump" animation as an anticipation as well as a falling down animation. Between all three of these, I keep the motions similar yet slightly altered; the right leg and left arm get the most movement but they are still logically connected. Most people wouldn't dramatically change which leg they are jumping with, so I made sure my sketches followed that realism.

    Another thing I considered in my sketches is context. Jonathan Cooper states that "Due to the unknown setting of most game animations, the animator must look for opportunities to give character to the player and nonplayer characters whenever possible, and must also consider when he or she should avoid it" (Cooper 50). While I am not currently in a position to animate both playable characters and nonplayable characters, I can do some things to make sure that Link has his own character. For example, I have already implemented animations for both standard and heavy attacks. For standard attacks, Link would do a simple slash and revert to his idle pose or walk cycle. For heavy attacks, however, Link would slash with both arms in a slower way in a slashing-and-stabbing type of motion. For both of these attacks, I have used squash and stretch to accentuate his sword movements as well, and am planning to use the animated sword from last week's blog for this purpose. I am also looking into incorporating taunts into his animation.

    Last, I have tried to incorporate elegance into my motions, despite my sketches being anything but that. Similar to the actual Legend of Zelda games that Link is from, I have strived to keep simplicity of design. There is some fairly sophisticated movement to the character, but at the same time there are not too many components and the model is not overloaded with detail.

References

Cooper, J. (2019). Game anim: Video game animation explained. Boca Raton, Fl: CRC Press, Taylor &

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