Parkour style girl animations.... running

chrismweb

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Working on some "Parkour" inspired animations for a character, inspired by games like "Vector" and "Canabalt".

They both weren't my favorite games, but really liked the action in the animations, and how fluid they looked.

Crits are welcome for advice! She seems to have a bit of a limp, but I couldn't really find much info on keyframes for run cycles, so mostly posed it close to what I saw from the other games, and then tried to clean it up as much as I could.

(don't mind the hands, or white color/ clothing)

chrismweb

I didn't have time for much today, but I skinned the game, and added my animated model from Spine. (as well as changed the way buildings are generated, to multiples of the building chunk size)

I just used a modified stock image for the building silhouettes in the background, and created tileable building textures based off Cannabalt style buildings.

They're definitely just place holder graphics for now, But you can see more how it has come together, to look like a "real" game.
(this is just a mini game inside of a main game)

('space' to jump)
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http://www.chrismweb.com/projects/dress_up2/runner_game/iteration3

Nate

Cool! 🙂 So you dress them up and then run them off the edge of a building? 😃

Søren

She seems to limit herself when running by not stretching the front leg and it kinda makes the run animation look strange. Take a look at Loading Image This is from another running game called Polara, which is actually pretty damn good.

chrismweb

Thanks Shiu!

It looks a bit better, but looking at the keyframes, I see how they look a lot more like they "connect" with the ground.

Guess I will have to practice more- look through Disney's books and the Animator survival one more at some point.

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Yeah Nate- I needed to figure out a way to add some kind of meaningful gameplay to the content-and since the main difference with our app is the animation, I figured some game to take advantage of it would be best (and something simple, to test whether people would actually play it, that are already playing the main game).

It worked! 😉 People play about double as long. Ideally I might end up making a separate game that is more like "sims" or a virtual pet, so they can actually do more stuff with their creation.

Also have to delve deeper into understanding LibGDX/ basic OpenGL stuff, since ideally I want people to be able to create their own textures.

Lets hope my 2d Terraria/Minecraft game does well, or I'll be making dress up games for awhile longer... 😉

They just take a lot of content creation, for very limited play time- but people actually play them, which is better than some other genres I've tried.

sez

The best animation tutorial I have found for walk-cycles is this one, by the Angry Animator.

http://www.angryanimator.com/word/2010/ ... alk-cycle/

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His advice to start with the contact pose, then do the recoil and high-point works well for me. By looking at his drawings of where the hands and feet are in each pose I've found I can improve my animations a lot.

In your animation - which looks really good by the way - it could be made better by making the lower arms and hands kind of "wrap" around the body more in the recoil pose. The contact pose is where the front foot hits the ground, and after that is the recoil where the body sinks to its lowest height - at this point the lower arm and hand come around and up in front of the body - you have the up, but not enough around, I think.

It's hard to do in 2D, because you cannot go "into" the page, but by using Spine's X to scale the limb lengthwise a bit you can simulate it.