When you start your jam game, you actually start with nothing. It took us a few hours to get a good idea, than decided on the game elements, @kazrath went to coding and I started to sketch the initial design.
We wanted to have little bots fighting each other, and I knew that I had two choices for character design and animation.
A - to give the robots wheels so I can skip animation entirely or
B - to make different type of walking robots
I choose option B because I am an idealist and I wanted to create the best!
So instead of these little "cars", I ended up with these guys:
They are more fun, they have personalities, BUT they need actual animation work.
Using an animation tool like Spine or DragonBones can help you with complex stuff, animating between keyframes. It is almost always faster than animating every frame by hand. I could export my assets and use an animation tool to create bones and fluent animations. But I still had so much to and setting skeletons and animating seemd too much now. So I was looking for an easier solution (and we did this so many times during those 72 hours) Now I am usually drawing in vector, namely in Inkscape. It is very easy to design and modify anything in it and I love this freedom and flexibility.
So I used Inkscape to create the absolute minimum of walk cycles for these robots. First you draw your robot, than you pose it. You can set the pivot points in Inkscape, so you can set up your own joints. Than you create a duplicate and pose it again. Than again. Bang, you are done!
I still wanted to keep things very simple, so I could not make a very complex walk cycle for each droids. Also, I don't know if you noticed, but each of them has a bit different type of locomotion.
The first ones have human like legs, the 2nd move on short legs with no knees, and the 3rd ones have 3 visible legs on this side and move like caterpillars. I was looking at walk cycles, made sketches, and walked with my fingers on the table a lot to understand how these will work and look natural. (can you say that for small droids?)
After a few trials and error I ended up with this:
In the final game we had to set the animation speed to the movement speed in Unity a good few times, but the movements are fluid enough, and the droids are actually working! And they only consist of 3 frames each!
After all I could spare a lot of time by creating very simple frame-by-frame animation. It seems counterintuitive, but if you make only a few frames it works very well!
If you want to see our droids in action, check out Trashwars here:
* https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/45/trashwars *
Thanks for reading!
