ITORAH Devlog #3 - The Animation of Nahucan

ITORAH has been released. But Grimbart has still a lot more to tell and share with you!
This time, he will give you insights into the animation of ITORAH's beautiful creatures and characters of Nahucan.

Therefore, grab a cup of coffee, or tea, lean back, and enjoy the many things, Grimbart will tell and show you:



Let's talk animation! The way our characters are designed presented a special challenge for animation, due to their many small details and complex shading. In the end we decided to go with 2D rigs, sometimes referred to as cutout or paperdoll animation, to keep the workload manageable.

Animating Itorah

In a game with monstrous spiders, serpents and other gigantic creatures, Itorah still remains the most complex character rig, simply due to the staggering amount of animations she required.
To up the quality of her keyframes and poses, Itorah has a huge library of different hands, feet and heads for Koda that can be switched out if necessary. This mostly benefited her combat animations since it enabled us to use large smears for her various attacks, but it also helped with acting during cutscenes.

Animating Enemies

While some characters like Chantico required a similar treatment with exchangeable body parts, most of our basic enemies are a bit more simple. Since their rigs don't need to be as flexible, they could lean more into shifting perspectives of existing parts, as seen in the example below.



The last step of any animation always involved some manual tweaking of the meshes to create lesser smear frames, or to push Itorahs clothing into certain perspectives.

Conclusion

All in all we strove for an animation style that is both easy to produce for a small indie studio and emulates traditional animation as close as possible.
Other benefits of using 2D character rigs that do not directly relate to animation are the ability for our programmers to attach colliders, hitboxes and effects to certain bones, like you would with 3D characters.
We hope this little window into our animation system provided you with some insight into how Itorah works under the hood!

You have missed Devlog #1 and Devlog #2 and wondering who this Grimbart is?

No worries, nothing easier than that:
https://steamcommunity.com/games/1132910/announcements/detail/3087782926776071030

https://steamcommunity.com/games/1132910/announcements/detail/3094540227834393650

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1132910/ITORAH/