State of Animation — State of the Art
A long time has passed since the second trailer and the last behind-the-scenes look at REPLACED. And today I want to touch on a new topic — the animation of the game.
The game has come a tremendously long way since our first simple asset store-purchased animation pack, the first in-house animated sprite of an idly standing unnamed hero (who later will become known as R.E.A.C.H.), then to an actually controllable walk cycle and, couple years later, to what we have today.
When tackling the animation, we are following 3 main principles, all of which were defined very early and had been present to this day:
1) Handcraft
All of the game's animations are hand-drawn, which means we are not taking any shortcuts when producing those literal hundreds of sprites. Maybe in the future we will use other tools and techniques, and we have tried many, but with REPLACED we really want to honour the craft.
2) Realism
The tone of the game, the setting and design goals we set early on are the things that naturally dictate the style of animation. It's made to be believable, alive and beautiful, while also balancing to be integrated for comfortable and responsive game play, unlike the cinematic platformers of the past, where realism of movement and technical limitations dictated a much less comfortable game play approach.
What really is an icing on the cake, in my opinion, is that we have developed a system to double down on an almost continuous, cut-free movement. It means that almost every move or state in the game is interconnected with other moves through a fully animated transition, which almost looks like an animated 3D model.
3) Impact
While removing the hassle of what came with the limitations of the past, we really wanted to somehow still capture this feeling of weight and action impact, so the character will be perceived like a person, rather than a freely floating block in the world. After a ton of experimentation I personally believe we have found something of a sweet spot.
Pulling this off required a lot of stress and a lot of iteration to get that feeling of silky-smooth continuously animated characters, which behave realistically in a cut scene, in platforming, or in combat.
As we are closing in on finishing the full move set of our protagonist, counting more than couple hundred pieces of animation alone, I personally believe this will be one of, if not the most complex pixel-art game ever made.
Keep a look out for more development blog updates!
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