Month: February 2016

We’ve all been there: our fresh paycheck now sixty bucks lighter, we slip the cellophane from a Brand New Game, pop it into our Current-Generation Gaming Machine’s disc tray, and poke the power button. As our pressing of start force-fades the title screen to black, we find our digital feet atop a vast field and marvel at the promise of open-world combat laid out before us–a blank page to pound out our fist-fueled poetry. We smirk when we catch a glimpse of our first target standing safely distant, seemingly enraptured by its own idle poses. We rush toward it with abandon, hoist our hands to the sky, and, upon entering striking distance, deliver what we expect to be a devastating blow.

The attack connects, the enemy loses health, our fists recede back to our sides allowing for a second strike, but something doesn’t feel quite right. We swing again. The raw-meat-to-pavement sound of digital skin connecting with digital skin and the pad vibrating in our palms assure us our fists have, yet again, met their mark, but something still feels off. There’s a disconnect we may not be able to explain.

We may be quick to shrug off this odd feeling, assuring ourselves there’s so much more canvas to work with–so many more heads to crack–certainly this one incident was an anomaly. We may continue our adventure through several more play sessions, or we may soon shelf the Brand New Game, though perhaps not entirely sure why.

Or maybe we pick up on the general issue right away, knowing something isn’t right about the animation. Maybe the collision is bad. Maybe our fists look as if they exert the force of tyrannosaur arms. Maybe it’s something else entirely.

As with any art form, successful video game animation evokes emotions in those who witness it. While any who peruse the artistic musings of others may not necessarily be able to explain the feeling they’re experiencing while doing so, they can certainly confirm that the feeling exists, or, in the case of our hypothetical Brand New Game, doesn’t.

While many titles have other positive factors to fall back on, the more combat-focused a game, the more important meaningful animations become. How can we be expected to sink hours into a release providing us with nothing but head-to-head combat if there’s no fist-to-the-gut feeling–like when Makoto connects with a Hayate in Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike–tied to the attacks?

A couple of years ago, Mariel Cartwright, the lead animator for Skullgirls, spoke at the Game Developers Conference, and the archive recently made its way to YouTube. Her talk, “Fluid and Powerful Animation within Frame Restrictions,” addresses this topic at length while offering samples from, you guessed it, Skullgirls.

In the example at the start of this article, the fabricated game represents an open world with sandbox-style roaming and a focus on combat—something like Grand Theft Auto, Metal Gear Solid V, or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. While games of this variety may occasionally fail to provide players with the visceral animations they need in order to leave their play session truly satisfied, they offer animators markedly more leeway to help assure players get what they came for, thanks in part to the inherent differences between animating player and non-player characters. In her talk, Cartwright acknowledges that enemy characters often necessitate larger tells for their attacks, affording adventurers time to tuck and roll, attack a weak spot, or employ any number of other tactics before the force of the blow can be felt.

But fighting game animators face a unique challenge in this regard, as every character–save very specific bosses along the lines of Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s Galactus–must be treated as player characters and, therefore, must be brought to life with much shorter animations overall. Were player character attacks as slow as those given to non-player characters, Cartwright notes, users would likely find the game unresponsive.

To give an idea of just how tiny these animation windows actually are, Cartwright explains that a common light attack in Skullgirls takes up, on average, only six frames. Since these animations come from the successful merging of multiple drawings, this leaves the average light attack with a paltry six images to create the illusion of movement. While this task may sound impossible, animators have found plenty of tricks to help even a jab have some heft behind it.

In the case of animating 2D attacks, as Cartwright has done for Skullgirls, some of the most important aspects revolve around deciding on a few key moments within an attack. Once picked, those moments provide anchor points to which various illusory tactics tie in. Things like anticipation, smears, and follow-through don’t necessarily make these in-between frames into works we’d want to hang from our walls, but they do serve as links between the pieces we would. When it comes to offering insight into what these specific techniques directly add to any given animation, she often says something to the effect of, “you don’t really see it, but you feel it.”

Which brings us back to the beginning example. In that fictitious game, everything appeared to line up: the user interface, the sound, tactile feedback from the controller, even the animation seemed correct–we swung our fists and the enemy eventually fell–but the combat still lacked intangibles. Soul, heart, whatever you want to call it. But fighting games, more common than not, pack in more than enough of these intangibles, these feelings of satisfaction when fist meets face, and we have teams of talented artists to thank for that.

We’ve included Cartwright’s talk below, so be sure to give it a watch for a full breakdown.

If you’re considering a career in game development, or have already started down that road, be sure to check out the Game Developers Conference YouTube channel; it’s got plenty of resources much like this talk from Cartwright.

Source: GDC