Dev Blog - Animation Pipeline
✨Hi! ✨
I'm Étienne! I co-founded Fika with my friends and I'm the animator and VFX artist on Ship of Fools.
Let's talk about animation! Just like Ariane said in the last dev-blog post, a lot of work and iteration needs to be done before you can find the right art direction for a game, and that counts for animation as well! Let me show you the (many) steps we took to find the right way to make things move in our game.
I focused on traditional 2D animation at university, so instinctively I decided to use that method during the very early stages of conceptualization. Taking inspiration from XCOM’s developers and how they created an all-animated "fake" gameplay video to pitch their game, we created this little 17 seconds clip called a previs (pre-visualization). Everything is animated frame-by-frame.
-CLIP01-
Some good ideas, some bad ones, funky little Fool designs and an isometric boat! This previs video, while being a very useful clip early on, took SO much time to create. It became clear to us that using traditional animation for our main characters wasn't the brightest idea for our first game. But that’s why we try things! 
Here is the same Todd design you saw in the previs, but this time Todd is a puppet rigged in a software called Toon Boom Harmony. I was still trying to use the tools I was accustomed to and Harmony is what I learned to animate with originally. It looks fine, we even re-did the puppets in the same software after Ariane redesigned the Fools. 
As the art direction for the game was getting clearer, we realized that Harmony wasn't offering us enough liberty to obtain the render style our artists were giving their illustrations. We wanted more details, more textures. Hence came Spine!
Spine is a wonderful software that allowed us to easily rig high-res illustrations to keep the level of visual polish our characters needed to fit their environment. Todd and Hink were fully animated in Spine, as were some enemies. But following some development shenanigans and technical tests, we decided to move again. We took our Todd and our Hink, our animations and our designs, and we moved to the 3D realm of Autodesk Maya...!
😯
Yes! Everything in Ship of Fools is animated in a 3D environment. Marc-André, our lovely Tech Artist, joined us during production and his skills with rigging in Maya were too valuable to ignore. Integration in Unity was also a lot smoother and we had access to all the data from the rigs, textures and materials. We finally found our animation home!
A lot more could be said about the animations in Ship of Fools, but that's it for now! I've rambled long enough. Hope you liked this little sneak peak at us learning to make games. And we are not done learning! Thank you all so much for the love and support, that's why we do it ♥️
Happy holidays, enjoy a complimentary clip of me doing refs for the paddle attack as a gift
Now that the Stormstrider is ready to sail into the Forgotten Waters make sure that you...
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