A little more about the importance and difficulty o creating an animation for a game

Do you know to what extent animations are necessary for a game? And how fundamental animation studies are to contributing to game design? Maybe it is much more than you think, but this goes unnoticed by us.

First I will contextualize a little the history of Animation until it is fundamental to a game. And not just because I want to talk about Animation in general, ok?

Since prehistoric times, people have been trying to pass the idea of moving to paintings and images, look at this animal in this cave painting in France, why does it have so many legs?

What about this sequence?

Greek and Egyptian paintings have also had their share in the history of animation, they try to convey this idea of movement through repetition and sequence of images in these vases.

As technology has advanced, mankind has created various ways to make images move. With optical equipment and toys such as the Thaumatrope, the Praxinoscope, the Phenacistoscope, the Zootriope, among other opiums and copiums, with increasingly unpronounceable names, but that, at the base, were all tools where a sequence of images was passing quickly and created the illusion of movement by the persistence of the image in our eyes.

It was then with the creation of projections like the Magic Lantern and film reels that animation took a leap forward with films like Fantasmagorie, and Gertie the Dinosaur. Going further and further with short films like Betty Boop, Popeye, Mickey, Looney tunes, Disney, Animes, Hanna Barbera, Computer Animation, 3D… Whew…

So if since the dawn of mankind, people have been trying to bring drawings to life through animation, you can’t imagine that games wouldn’t be left out.

But you might say “ah, that’s obvious, things have to move in the game, so they have to be animated”. Well, it’s not just about making things move, they have to have a purpose with both the narrative of the game and the gameplay. And this takes a lot of study in animation, study that these guys have been doing throughout this whole story that I summarized at the beginning.

For example, even using motion capture in an extremely realistic game, the movements and animations have to go through changes and refinements, following the basic concepts of animation, to make them more pleasing to the eye, and to convey the message that the game wants to convey at that moment. Because sometimes the real movement of things when passed to a game, or to a cartoon, doesn’t look “real”, I know it’s weird. And especially in a game it can really not work and get in the way of the whole experience.

But let’s go slowly, first some very important things that you may never have realized. A very simple but at the same time very important concept of animation, which is fundamental for games, is the animation itself! Things have to move, otherwise, it is just an image.

Have you ever wondered why old cartoons like Betty Boop and Mickey himself, didn’t stop moving for a second, they were always dancing and jumping, even when they were standing still they were moving up and down. Because it was an animation, it had to move, otherwise, it would just be an illustration, a cartoon, and not an animated film. If it didn’t have movement, it wouldn’t fill the eyes with the novelty of the time that was animated films, and it would also take the viewer out of immersion, even for a second.

And this concept was brought into games, with the famous Idle, which is the animation for when the player is stopped. When the player stops moving the character for some reason, the game doesn’t stop, the character continues in the scenery, the game universe continues to exist, imagine if the character or the scenery were to remain static while not receiving a command, it would look like time stopped inside the game, it was paused, it’s a static image, or locked? But of course this can be part of the game experience as in the case of the game “Super Hot” that time actually stops when you don’t move.

Idle animation solves this quite simply and has been used for quite some time. One of the first times it was used was in the 1978 game Android Nim, where the androids look to the side and talk to each other while waiting for the player’s command. But one of the most remembered is for sure the one in Sonic the Hedgehog, where Sonic, impatient with the player’s delay, and crazy to run again, stomps his foot on the ground and looks angry at the screen. With this example of Sonic, you can see how a simple animation can convey a lot of information about a character. He is fast and impatient.

And this together with the concept of secondary animation, which is animations that happen besides the main action, such as the scenery moving, an NPC in the background, etc, contribute to the game experience not being broken, and the immersion continuing.

The way a character is animated, and how he/she moves, are all designed to convey his/her personality and the narrative, and the feeling of the game. This, along with the other animations in the game, is intrinsically linked to game design and the experience that the Game Designer wants to pass on to the player. And to be able to unite all these concepts of animation, narrative, experience, and gameplay is quite complicated.  

For example, when a person jumps, this action takes time, first, he prepares himself, takes impulse, jumps, spends a second in the air, falls, cushions the fall, and returns to the initial position. This is all passed on to the animation, anticipation, speed, weight, curves, and concepts known as animation principles, which I can bring up here some other time.

But when we are producing a game, we don’t have time for all this action, when the player presses the jump button he wants the character to be in the air. When he presses the attack button, the character has to respond as fast as possible. All these steps in an attack or jump animation, among others, have to be cut to favor gameplay and game design, but how to cut these without making the animation look bad? This is where animation studies come in, what ways can we use to solve this problem? 

Some games have already dealt with these problems and brought some solutions. For example the game Shadow of the Colossus, the whole game is made to transmit calmness and fluidity, you can see this perfectly in the animation of the Colossus, who move slowly and calmly, mainly to transmit their grandiosity in relation to Wander, the protagonist. But Wander himself moves slowly and fluidly enough to keep the game experience going, and still contribute to the character’s characteristic jovial, slightly clumsy nature, as he flails his arms and falls when running and jumping. 

But still, we need the character to perform the action as fast as possible when jumping. So this fluidity and calmness happen after the action. When the player presses the button, Wander jumps instantly, but after that, he performs a slower animation while in the air, keeping the characteristic of the game and the character. This is also possible because the game design needs the character to jump farther and spend more time in the air, than what would happen in reality. And then game design and animation marry, transmitting the gameplay experience, without losing the narrative and animation experience.

Other games where this happens are the first God of War, where Kratos needs to attack as fast as possible because it is the main characteristic of the game. So the anticipation, weight, and strength of the attack, which would be animated before the execution, happen after the execution, and in some parts of the huge combos, he performs. When the player presses the button, the blade and chain are quickly in front hitting the enemy, and until the player presses again to continue the combo, the animation continues some more. 

Until at a certain moment, he reaches a part of the combo where the animation is not cut and it is purposely longer, and you feel the weight and strength that this attack has, because this is part of the game design and gameplay.

This concept of using animation as part of the mechanics and gameplay happens in other games such as in some animations of the Souls series games. When a character is using a very heavy armor or weapon, this weight and difficulty that the game designer wants to convey are shown through the animation, which is slower and more time-consuming. But this is not the case when the character is dodging an attack, because in this case, the faster animation is necessary for gameplay, even if it is not very realistic.

An example of a game that makes heavy use of animation as part of its gameplay is the first game in the Prince of Persia series. The developer used the technique of rotoscoping, which consists in animating something over recorded images of the action. In this case, he recorded his brother executing the movements, to be able to make the animations on top of the images. The animation was very fluid and realistic, which was totally intentional for the game design because the fluidity of the animation and the delay to make a movement was part of the difficulty that the game intended to pass. The player has to think about his steps well because the protagonist will not make an instant jump like Mario and other characters.

I think it was enough to show a little of how animation serves the game design, and game design serves animation. It’s a joint effort to provide the most enjoyable game experience possible and still be able to fill your eyes with beautiful, fluid animations. And it was also possible to see how difficult it is to create animations for a game with all these restrictions regarding mechanics, commands, and execution time, and I didn’t even talk about fighting games. But who knows the next time? For now, this introduction served to understand a little more about the importance and difficulty of creating an animation for a game.