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[astrospoon]

So I pulled out my Genesis last night and tried out some of my old games... the one that stuck out the most? Aladdin. Not only is it a good game, but the animation is INCREDIBLE! 

I remember hearing that the actual Disney animators did the art, and it shows. Unlike most sprite work in games the shapes of the characters are REALLY changing. The squash and stretch is super apparent, and as a result, the animations come to life!

Here are some of the enemies:



Now check out Aladdin's sprite:



To compare, the SNES Aladdin was a different game entirely, with more typical "video game" sprites:



It isn't nearly as nice, despite the technical advantages the SNES offered.

The thing that boggles my mind is that most indie pixel games try to emulate the more stiff traditional video game sprites. In my mind, the sprites based on traditional hand animation look worlds better. It seems like people should take a closer look into traditional animation before doing pixel art. Even games like Braid and Cave Story (while awesome looking in their own right) have fairly stiff, restrained animations.

(A great place to start is the book The Animator's Survival Kit http://www.amazon.com/Animators-Survival-Kit-Richard-Williams/dp/0571202284)

Also, the guys at Shiny (who made Aladdin for Genesis), ended up making Earthworm Jim, which ALSO has some incredible animations. Seems like the time spent working with Disney payed off:



In my opinion, this is the kind of smooth, exciting animation we should be shooting for now, whether it be pixel art or high-res 2D art. I think people should stop using shortcuts. Stop pasting and rotating arms and whatnot and actually draw the frames with life! Flash has made people lazy animators!!!!

What *newer* games can you guys point out that are really awesomely animated? I know Critter Crunch is amazing. But even something like RocketBirds Revolutions seems to cheat the animations with some skeletal 2D flash style animation, and looks kind of stuff because of it.

Do you think it is just a lack of skill that prevents more games from going this route?

A lack of time?

Or something else?

[Shambrook]

I agree with pretty much exactly what you said (Also mad props for the shiny love, there games were gorgeous, if memory serves all the earth worm jim sprites were done by traditional 2D animators in pencil then turned into sprites)

I think the main thing limiting animation in games is the skill level of the people making them. Popper animation is a difficult thing. With teams of 1 or 2 people making the game, usually those people don't have time to dedicate to learning the ins and outs of traditional 2D animation

[JaJitsu]

this is really interesting. especially seeing how stiff the snes Aladdin was.

Def. an eye opener as an animator.

[ChevyRay]

Skill is definitely a factor. I don't think lots of indie pixel games try to "emulate" the stiff look as it's just what comes out of quickly and/or amateurly designed animations. Honestly, I bet everybody here would love sprites that were animated that well, but it'd probably take me 2 years to do that Aladdin sprite alone.

I agree that some people should definitely try improving on their animation and taking their games' artwork to new levels, but I disagree that all should (right off the bat). There are many facets of game design, and if those who have to spread their skills around to complete games focus too much in a single area, it shows in others, badly. I try to focus on animations quite a bit, but I also have to focus on level design, making the difficulty of my game reasonable, programming it bug-free and with responsive controls, etc. etc. etc. Every time I do a new game, I try to advance upon each of these skills individually and keep improving on each, but without the stiff, quick shortcut animations, I wouldn't be even remotely this far already.

So it's fine to use shortcuts, if you need them, but don't rely on them for every new game, try taking a new approach every game and never get complacent with a single animation (or programming, design, etc.) style. Smooth fantastic animations like that are definitely something to aim for, but trying to jump too many steps at a time is just gonna end with somebody landing on their head.


EDIT: Holy crap having a look at these aladdin animations closer 0_o they really are impressive. I've always been a fan of the Earthworm Jim games though <3<3

[Chris Whitman]

Man, if someone wants to contribute animation like that to my project, you won't find me complaining!

Personally, though, I took the cut-out animation approach due to time constraints. I'd really much prefer to have really solid animation, but when you are one person generating a game full of content and not a trained animator, your options are a bit limited.

[Xion]

I would love it if more games in general, indie or not, had animation on par with that of Earthworm Jim and Aladdin.

[astrospoon]

Just found some cool scans of some of the actual drawings that the EWJim animations were made from: http://slappypictures.blogspot.com/2010/03/making-of-earthworm-jim.html

Inspiring stuff, and probably quite a bit different from most people's game art processes!

As for the lack of skill though- Don't you guys think that some young animators would love to contribute to indie games though? It seems like more of a problem in the gap between the communities than anything else...

[John Nesky]

While I agree that there are lots of ways we could improve our animation, I think an important tradeoff to consider is giving the animator more control over the timing and movement of the character, vs giving the player more control. Sometimes we need to strike a compromise.

However, this tradeoff only applies to protagonists. As for the rest of the characters, go ahead and smoothly transition between all movements.

[Chris Whitman]

In big production 3D games, they typically use an animation graph system which identifies points of transfer between different animations to avoid any interpolation weirdness. You could definitely do something similar with skeletal-based 2D animation, but I wonder how much extra work it would take to do it with classical animation.

[baconman]

It depends on how much of a project you're doing, and how much you know and learn between both aspects, and how well (if there's more than one of you) you communicate fine details, like frames per command. Having a 12-frame jumping animation will do you no good in a 9-frame jump, right? Agreed-upon pacing is key in making a project work cohesively. Badly-planned games can overanimate into being slow-paced; but if well-planned, that's easily avoidable.

Another thing - especially using Aladdin and EWJ as perfect examples thereof - is that greatly animated sprites occur as a result of both proper line-of-action (SNES vs. Genesis Aladdin - check out the apple throwing) and blur/smear frames; something many developers unaware of such approaches don't take into account with hitboxes or programming dimensions.

In fact, it's entirely plausible that a good 8-framer is nothing but a "solid" 4-frame animation with good in-betweeners sequenced in. Most coders/programmers worry only about the key frames.

*Off-topic, but I thought the SNES Aladdin was the one that featured the superior graphics... I could be wrong, though.

[ChevyRay]

As for the lack of skill though- Don't you guys think that some young animators would love to contribute to indie games though? It seems like more of a problem in the gap between the communities than anything else...

Good point. That's why, at this point in time, all the games I'm working on are in collaboration with other artists/animators, so there's someone to work on the animation as a fulltime task while I code/design.

It's definitely hard to find enough trust to get a talented animator to work with though, lots of animators work with coders on projects and one or the other ends up bailing out.

[ChevyRay]

Just found some cool scans of some of the actual drawings that the EWJim animations were made from: http://slappypictures.blogspot.com/2010/03/making-of-earthworm-jim.html

Oh man! Thanks for sharing this great find!

[Nystre]

I don't think the standard needs to be set this high, but any animator who strives enough to achieve this level of quality definitely deserves some recognition.

[Xion]

On the note of actually improving indie animation as suggested by the thread title, hows about we bring to light some good online articles about animation principals and whatnot?

or, oh oh, we could have animation workshops ala the (figure) drawing workshop? Maybe we could start off with a flour sack. I've always wanted to try that but never had the incentive.


I'm really sleepy right now so ugh but here's a site:
Pencil Test Depot

[Gainsworthy]

I'm really sleepy right now so ugh but here's a site:
Pencil Test Depot

Now, I mean, yes, I do know, and have always known, that old cartoons, they were all done by hand.

HOWEVER.

I've never actually known it. I mean, surely, they must use some magic technique. A trick - if not of the eye, then of the hand. They couldn't possibly draw every frame with that level of consistency.

And then, I see all those little notes and changes in paper textures and unfinished lines and all the gears in my poor little head stop spinning for a while and that's really amazing. Who thought that 46 seconds of Looney Tunes could be so inspiring?

[jpgray]

If you want to learn animation, I recommend the Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams, mad genius.  If you want something a bit simpler, Preston Blair's book is a good place to start.  Here's the cover of Williams's, animated:





edit: It's also painstaking work, which may not square up well for indies.  Getting quality work out in volume that doesn't take months and months really requires a team effort.  Even veteran animators at Warner Bros. would only produce 30 feet or so of film per week.

[JasonPickering]

gainsworthy: yeah its a lot of drawings. although usual hand drawn animation runs at 24 frames a second and a lot of that work is done on 2s meaning its only 12 frames per second. In the more complicated stuff thats when you get in to the 24 frames. but still a 10 second animation on 2s is 120 drawings. and thats assuming its only one character sometimes people might have multiple layers of animation.

I agree with pretty much what everyone has said. I would like to see indie games use that level of animation. i always liked the pixel art but I have thought about doing a more heavily animated game. the problem lies in response. if you ever jump in earthworm jim you know its not as responsive as it could be. see on a jump the player spends about 2 frames in an anticipation going down then finally leaps up. now in a 30 FPS game that means we are actually jumping .07 seconds after we push the button.  but if you design the game to not need super responsive times I think it would look great. I have started drawing again, maybe I need to build myself a light table and get to work.

[Jvie]

There's also this site where you can learn about traditional animation. It's written by John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy and other cartoons.

[raleigh]

I agree that lack of time and skill is a big reason there's so little good animation. I think another important reason is that the tools suck.

If there was a program that streamlined all the busywork currently required for animating, I think animations would improve by leaps and bounds. Even Photoshop CS4 with its animation features is a pain the ass to use.

If you've ever played with Animanatee on the DS you know how easy it is to make decent animations quickly, and I feel like it only touches the surface of what a well designed piece of software could allow us to do.

[astrospoon]

I think another important reason is that the tools suck. ... Even Photoshop CS4 with its animation features is a pain the ass to use.

Yeah- CS4 would work great from frame by frame animation, but it makes you create a new layer for every frame, and then manage turning the opacity on and off or whatever. It would be nice to be able to make "animation" layers, that you can draw something different on each frame. Flash works well in this regard, though im not crazy about the pen/line quality in Flash. Has anyone ever tried out Toon Boom?

Also, I was thinking about this more.... A bunch of game artists, especially back in the 16 bit days, were not traditional pro artists, let alone pro animators. They were dudes just like us making games on their own or in small teams with whatever they had available. So you are essentially learning the art of animation from amateurs if you learn from game art, not to mention the color/resolution/frame count restrictions that made their stuff even worse! It doesn't really make sense at all to learn how to animate a good walk cycle by looking at this stuff.

BTW- the next step of this whole thing is to put this into practice. I realize I'm pretty guilty of much of what I am railing against here, so I think it would be hypocritical if I didn't stick to my guns and show some (at least attempted) results from this.