Finding a suitable toolchain for animating Blightbound’s 2D characters by Joost van Dongen on 03/11/21 11:04:00 am
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutras community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
For Blightbound our technical ambitions for the 2D animation system were quite lofty: we wanted high quality animation, screen-filling bosses, crisp character art, high framerate and swappable gear. This required a complete rework of our animation pipeline, since the sprite sheets we used in Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers 2 allow for none of those requirements, except for high quality animations. In today’s blogpost I’d like to explain the problems we faced, and what combination of tools we chose to solve them. This is the first half of a two-parter: next week I’ll discuss our skin editor and its implications on animation.