Be careful that the finesse of the animations aren't at the expense of the playability. For instance it takes way too long for the Guinea Pig to stand up again once it collided with the box.
These animations are awesome!
But as previously mentioned, don't let animations get in the way of solid gameplay. Having run into a similar situation awhile back with a project, don't let animations dictate gameplay. It pretty much killed the project because we couldn't marry 'that look' with fun and smooth gameplay. Especially one that's about speed. My experience we ended up speeding up a number of the animations to prevent them from feeling really jarring when they performed, but at the cost of the animation looking good, which leads to more work fixing them.
I'm inclined to disagree with your wording - in my holistical view of games, animation IS gameplay. Neither dictates the other, or maybe each dictates the other.
What I'm trying to get at is that animation and controls are created in the synthesis between each other. There are some gameplay enhancing movements that you would never get with a colored-box prototype environment.
There's a mile-wide difference between pressing a button and then waiting 1 second for your character-box to interact with an enemy box
and
pressing a button and watching your character sprite start swinging a very heavy axe for 1 second before hitting the enemy sprite
even though those two are the exact same in code they will convey something entirely different to the player
in this way the animator working on a game can't just sit down and draw cool looking movements and then give them to a coder for implementation, and by the same account a coder can't just write behavior for a player hitbox and then simply apply animation to it
and neither the animator nor the coder can then blame the other for the end result not working. game animation needs to be a collaborative process where you work towards a vision of movement together and carefully iterate what should be hand-animated frames and what should be procedural movement.
As I'm writing this I realize this is probably what you meant to begin with, but the way you phrased it is slightly coder-centric and could be interpreted as being dismissive of wanting to achieve "that look" and concluding that "gameplay comes first", which I ultimately agree with - I just wanted to add that as an animator "that look" and "gameplay first" is part of the same ideal. I think that every type of motion has the potential for good gameplay, and I think every type of gameplay has the potential for good motion.
Basically I'm here to sow confusion and dissolve matters. I'm sorry. Thank you for sparking this tirade, it felt good to write out. In the end I am convinced we agree on this and the final text I wrote is more directed out in the air than towards you.
I have no idea why this thread has become the place I come to vent animator ideas, and if JoeGP would like me to take this discussion elsewhere I gladly will.
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