Animation Improvements – Design

September 14, 2018

Back when I was creating the game engine for The Unlocked Room, the first game in the Sleuthhounds series, I started by thinking through the capabilities of previous adventure games, espeically the classics of LucasArts and Sierra from the eighties and nineties. Among the aspects I considered were the needs of character animation.

For that first Sleuthhounds game I was starting from a zero point. I intentionally kept the design of that game simple in order to work out all the basic systems needed for an adventure game. For character animations I identified four basic types I needed to support:

  • Standing
  • Talking (a special case of standing)
  • Walking
  • Ad-hoc Animations (stuff like shaking hands, picking up items, and so on)

Over the course of the successive games, these basic animation types served me well and I was able to mostly accomplish what I wanted. However, there were a few things that I chose not to include from my initial inspection of previous adventures and a few things that I've come to see would be nice to have since my initial animation design. Specifically:

  • Idles – When a character hasn't done anything for a while they should run a short animation of fidgeting, looking around, straightening their clothes, etc.
  • Blinking – It seems like a small thing, but I've played a few games where characters blink their eyes and it really does help them seem more alive.
  • Head Turns and Eye Darts – Currently if I want a character to look in a given direction I have to change their entire body pose. It would be nice to be able to just turn their head or to have them look out of the corners of their eyes as that's far more natural than turning their entire bodies.
  • Walk and Talks – Currently when a character is walking it's possible to have them say a line of dialog but it's not possible for their heads to be animated at the same time. It would be nice if a character could be shown as speaking at the same time they're walking.
  • Gestures while Talking – Similar to walk and talks, having the ability for a character to gesture while talking would be great. In previous games I've done such things as have characters temporarily cross their arms betweensaying lines of dialog. It would be nice to be able to have them speak while their arms are crossed.

Since the upcoming Sleuthhounds: Cruise game is my first “feature length” game, so to speak, I've been reevaluating the capabilities of the game engine to see what I can enhance to more easily provide additional nuances and refinements. Character animation is at the top of the list for such improvements.

After considering all the additional abilities I'd like to incorporate, I've laid out a high-level design for an improved animation system. The basic animation types will now consist of the following:

  • Standing
  • Walking
  • Idling
  • Ad-hoc Animations

These basic types will form the body of a character. Heads, which are currently treated as a subcomponent of standing animations to allow for talking, will now be more generalized to be a subcomponent of all animations. Furthermore, heads will have eyes as a subcomponent. This will allow for easy movements and blinks as well as for changing the mood of the character through changing the eyes and the rest of the head.

With the new design hierachy and capabilities in mind, I've been going through the existing engine code finding all the touchpoints where animation is needed. With this review done, the next step is to move onto actually implementing the new system. Fingers crossed that by next week I'll have something to show for the work.