Developer Blog #6 - Animating Astronimo
Greetings, I'm Rich, Lead Animator on Astronimo and dutifully tasked with infusing each frame of the game with as much wobble, jiggle and flop as I can physically muster.
I'd be delighted to take you through the Animation process and offer some insight into a few of the (arguably questionable) decisions we've made along the way!
But first, for sake of context, let's journey back to the first pieces of animation I created for this game, so many moons ago.
First Steps
When I first rolled up to the project, fresh faced and several years younger, the characters were little more than blank capsules, sliding about the place with reckless abandon.
My first port of call was to make some style tests for the player character's basic movement and attempt to find a fitting gait for our fearless spacefolk.
In the final game you can still see the residual DNA of the latter two, beaten into shape for our run & jog speed animations respectively.
“But what sorcery is this?” you might be asking, “How are they moving at all!?” Well, let's take a brief trip down the animation pipeline!
The Animation Pipeline
To begin, a beautiful 3d model arrives, fresh off the press, from our talented Art Department. There may be some pre-emptive back & forth with an Artist, vertices might be pushed around, dimensions tweaked until we're confident the model will withstand the immeasurable burden of being jostled about by an Animator.
Next, it's time for Rigging! We begin by building a skeleton for the model. It likely won't have as many bones as you or I, but each bone will roughly correspond to a singular moving part of the model.
The skeleton is bound to the 3d model via a process commonly referred to as "skinning" in which each vertex is told which respective bone (or combination of bones) it should follow.
With our skeleton in place, a control system is built to sit atop the bones and drive them - the strings to our puppet if you will. This is usually composed of colourful shapes that we can easily grab and pull around, sometimes in order to animate but quite often just to entertain ourselves.
Our rig is now functionally complete and it is, at last, time to animate! By moving our controls from one position to another over a given time range and setting “keyframes”, we can lay out what is essentially a list of instructions that appear as fluid movement when played back. We can set keyframes for things like position, rotation and scale!
Rinse and repeat for each control and you've got yourself something that resembles a game-ready animation! The process is essentially the same whether you're animating a mechanical plunger or an anthropomorphic space crocodile!
Our animation can now be exported out to the game engine and implemented! And with that out of the way, let's talk a little bit about the approach to style within the Animation of Astronimo.
Stylistic Approach
From the outset, we knew we wanted something quite rubbery & slapstick that would play nicely with the visual appearance of the characters & environment. We aimed to find a balance that matched pace in silliness, whilst staying in keeping with the strong physics-based nature of the game.
After several passes of refinement, we whittled it down to a rough visual rule-set that leans heavily into a sense of elasticity with plentiful helpings of squash and stretch, but makes effort not to stray too far from a believable sense of physics (discounting meditational levitation!).
As such, reasonably realistic representations of gravity and mass are important here - objects shouldn't hang for too long in the air, nor should they stop moving abruptly without good reason to do so. They should, however, drag behind, overlap and wobble wherever possible, as though each individual segment is comically held together by novelty springs.
There are, no doubt, exceptions to this ruleset throughout, but this was the basic blueprint we strived for. Let’s look at a few applications of this approach!
The Humanoid
The player character (or “Rig_humanoid” as we lovingly call them) is perhaps the life form you’ll spend the most time with. We realised fairly early on that, due to the often sizable distance they may be from the camera, larger & more exaggerated movements were crucial in order to remain readable from further away.
With the ability to manipulate the characters upper body and arms at any time, the player themselves takes on a role of puppeteer and it becomes, in a way, a matter of player & animator co-operation to bring these small squishy creatures to life.
As such, we found many of our in-game taunts (A collection of dances and emotes you’ll find as rewards scattered about the star system) worked best when the upper torso is kept fairly stable, affording the player the wiggle room they need to adequately express themselves. They are also able to augment most animations in the game in this same manner, by manually bending the character’s spine to add new flavour to a run, walk or jump. I personally found this system, at times, challenging to facilitate but massively gratifying to watch players explore and abuse.
For additional context-based squashiness & maximum gelatinous effect, there is a set of slightly horrifying poses that we additively blend over the top of the character’s animations depending on what they are doing & how fast they are moving. This allows them to dynamically stretch outwards when falling and compress upon impact.
Components & Contraptions
We wanted the components to feel tactile and lively when constructing contraptions, as though the building blocks themselves are waking up and springing to life.
We tried to imbue character into them by having them rapidly bloom into existence like flowers on a stem, rattle haphazardly when in use and judder to a halt.
Forgotten Machines
If not for our courageous commander, Captain Croc, then our only other companions in this deserted solar system are the abandoned mechanical apparatus that litter it. It doesn’t take much for us humans to project our human-like qualities & mannerisms onto inanimate objects and so that’s exactly what we did! Whilst un-inanimating them!
A little turn of the body or wobble of an antenna can go a long way in a player’s perception of an object as “sentient”. We often author short, idle-alt animation for these machines, playing at random intervals to keep them feeling alive (and presumably very lonely).
Closing Thoughts
The sheer amount of times and ways I’ve managed to misspell the word “animation” throughout this (pre-spellcheck) blog post has frankly been equal parts upsetting and sobering.
If you’ve made it this far, thankyou for indulging this Astronimo animation-flavoured ramble. If you have even half as much fun playing this game as I’ve had helping to make it, you’ll be in for an absolute treat.
I'd be delighted to take you through the Animation process and offer some insight into a few of the (arguably questionable) decisions we've made along the way!
But first, for sake of context, let's journey back to the first pieces of animation I created for this game, so many moons ago.
First Steps
When I first rolled up to the project, fresh faced and several years younger, the characters were little more than blank capsules, sliding about the place with reckless abandon.
My first port of call was to make some style tests for the player character's basic movement and attempt to find a fitting gait for our fearless spacefolk.
In the final game you can still see the residual DNA of the latter two, beaten into shape for our run & jog speed animations respectively.
“But what sorcery is this?” you might be asking, “How are they moving at all!?” Well, let's take a brief trip down the animation pipeline!
The Animation Pipeline
To begin, a beautiful 3d model arrives, fresh off the press, from our talented Art Department. There may be some pre-emptive back & forth with an Artist, vertices might be pushed around, dimensions tweaked until we're confident the model will withstand the immeasurable burden of being jostled about by an Animator.
Next, it's time for Rigging! We begin by building a skeleton for the model. It likely won't have as many bones as you or I, but each bone will roughly correspond to a singular moving part of the model.
The skeleton is bound to the 3d model via a process commonly referred to as "skinning" in which each vertex is told which respective bone (or combination of bones) it should follow.
With our skeleton in place, a control system is built to sit atop the bones and drive them - the strings to our puppet if you will. This is usually composed of colourful shapes that we can easily grab and pull around, sometimes in order to animate but quite often just to entertain ourselves.
Our rig is now functionally complete and it is, at last, time to animate! By moving our controls from one position to another over a given time range and setting “keyframes”, we can lay out what is essentially a list of instructions that appear as fluid movement when played back. We can set keyframes for things like position, rotation and scale!
Rinse and repeat for each control and you've got yourself something that resembles a game-ready animation! The process is essentially the same whether you're animating a mechanical plunger or an anthropomorphic space crocodile!
Our animation can now be exported out to the game engine and implemented! And with that out of the way, let's talk a little bit about the approach to style within the Animation of Astronimo.
Stylistic Approach
From the outset, we knew we wanted something quite rubbery & slapstick that would play nicely with the visual appearance of the characters & environment. We aimed to find a balance that matched pace in silliness, whilst staying in keeping with the strong physics-based nature of the game.
After several passes of refinement, we whittled it down to a rough visual rule-set that leans heavily into a sense of elasticity with plentiful helpings of squash and stretch, but makes effort not to stray too far from a believable sense of physics (discounting meditational levitation!).
As such, reasonably realistic representations of gravity and mass are important here - objects shouldn't hang for too long in the air, nor should they stop moving abruptly without good reason to do so. They should, however, drag behind, overlap and wobble wherever possible, as though each individual segment is comically held together by novelty springs.
There are, no doubt, exceptions to this ruleset throughout, but this was the basic blueprint we strived for. Let’s look at a few applications of this approach!
The Humanoid
The player character (or “Rig_humanoid” as we lovingly call them) is perhaps the life form you’ll spend the most time with. We realised fairly early on that, due to the often sizable distance they may be from the camera, larger & more exaggerated movements were crucial in order to remain readable from further away.
With the ability to manipulate the characters upper body and arms at any time, the player themselves takes on a role of puppeteer and it becomes, in a way, a matter of player & animator co-operation to bring these small squishy creatures to life.
As such, we found many of our in-game taunts (A collection of dances and emotes you’ll find as rewards scattered about the star system) worked best when the upper torso is kept fairly stable, affording the player the wiggle room they need to adequately express themselves. They are also able to augment most animations in the game in this same manner, by manually bending the character’s spine to add new flavour to a run, walk or jump. I personally found this system, at times, challenging to facilitate but massively gratifying to watch players explore and abuse.
For additional context-based squashiness & maximum gelatinous effect, there is a set of slightly horrifying poses that we additively blend over the top of the character’s animations depending on what they are doing & how fast they are moving. This allows them to dynamically stretch outwards when falling and compress upon impact.
Components & Contraptions
We wanted the components to feel tactile and lively when constructing contraptions, as though the building blocks themselves are waking up and springing to life.
We tried to imbue character into them by having them rapidly bloom into existence like flowers on a stem, rattle haphazardly when in use and judder to a halt.
Forgotten Machines
If not for our courageous commander, Captain Croc, then our only other companions in this deserted solar system are the abandoned mechanical apparatus that litter it. It doesn’t take much for us humans to project our human-like qualities & mannerisms onto inanimate objects and so that’s exactly what we did! Whilst un-inanimating them!
A little turn of the body or wobble of an antenna can go a long way in a player’s perception of an object as “sentient”. We often author short, idle-alt animation for these machines, playing at random intervals to keep them feeling alive (and presumably very lonely).
Closing Thoughts
The sheer amount of times and ways I’ve managed to misspell the word “animation” throughout this (pre-spellcheck) blog post has frankly been equal parts upsetting and sobering.
If you’ve made it this far, thankyou for indulging this Astronimo animation-flavoured ramble. If you have even half as much fun playing this game as I’ve had helping to make it, you’ll be in for an absolute treat.