Visceral Combat – Animation Guidelines
Posted On Friday, May 1st, 2009 By Jay
Great combat in a game is broken into many disparate elements. For the visceral combat line of posts, we’re going to focus on responsive combat. Good combat design breaks down any moment to a series of events. Each event is driven by a rule. Once you have your set of rules, you get to play the Lego bricks game of building combat moves and characters. Let’s talk about animation
Animation Guidelines
Just like any sport, motion and controlling that motion makes or breaks an animation. Weight control, pose, follow apply to the worlds greatest athletes and also to video game avatars. For combat, I like to break my combat animation into 3 parts: Start – Impact – End.
Start
The start animation is the character build up. For WoW, this happens to be the casting animation, for most brawlers this is a low frame count section where the character blends from idle to the initial pose.
IRL, bring your hand over your head and make a fist. You’ve just completed a start animation.
Impact
Impact is my favorite part of the combat animation sequence. It mostly deals with the targets reaction, so we’ll deal with that later. For our purposes, the impact section is the meat that your player understands. They notice and will describe their favorite animations based on the impact section of the move.
IRL, with your hand in the air, bring your hand from above your head to directly in front of you with your arm follow extended. The distance between the start and this “impact” point is the impact section of the animation.
End
Ahh! The end animation, AKA the follow through. This section is where magic happens. Transitions from your combat animation to traversal states and other combat moves happen here. You’ll notice that the end of your combat animation occurs after the impact of the same animation. This is very important. Additionally the end section can inform the “power” of the animation.
Example 1:
Repeat IRL sections above, then bring your hand straight back and to your side, keep your feet planted. You’ll notice that you slow down your arm once it is perpendicular to your body. Then you gather your arm back to your body. Because of the speed and motion, your hand travels in a upwards curve towards your side. Notice how you felt about this RL animation. Did it feel powerful? Comedic? Effective? Ask yourself if you were watching a video game avatar do this move, what reaction would you expect?
Example 2:
Repeat IRL sections above, exclude example 2. Instead of bringing your arm perpendicular to your body, cut your right hand(the one above your head) diagonally across your body and step forward with your right foot. Notice how that felt. Did it feel powerful? Comedic? Effective? Ask yourself if you were watching a video game avatar do this move, what reaction would you expect?
Summary
This is a very brief, very basic overview of some animation guidelines I’ve learned and stand by. Next visceral combat post will take a look at a couple combat systems(Sonny 2, EQ2, WoW) and discuss rules established that inform the player experience.
