When I first began to implement the player avatar, it became apparent that it felt very lifeless. This wasn’t due to a lack of animations, but mainly because it sensed a lack of reaction whenever the player gave input, especially from the player’s free aim movement.
At this point I only had basic player X-Axis flipping in order to indicate that you are aiming at a different direction on the horizontal level. Originally I had this tied to whichever direction you were moving in, but I soon realized how easily this conflicted with the free aim mechanic, so I switched it.
I decided to look through some old 2D games to see how developers made their characters feel more alive, besides having good animations. That’s when I remembered an old game from my childhood called Worms. The worm avatars gave me several ideas on what I could use, one of which was how they aimed weapons.
Instead of having their hands be part of their normal body, it was actually part of the weapon sprite. Even though there is nothing that’s connecting their hand to their body, it felt quite natural whenever they aimed up and down.
That alone gave a lot of life into the player avatar, but it was no enough in my opinion, so I continued to look at what else they did. I noticed that the worms’ eyes followed the player’s crosshair, giving the impression that the avatar is looking at where the player is currently aiming.
One fragment I haven’t implemented yet, but is on my to-do list, is to add eyelid movement as well. Blinking feels like a natural action to expect from your avatar, even more so, in combination with eyebrows, it can work for expressing different types of emotions. Such as when the player takes damage, or starts firing their gun.
The next and final step in this entry I think should be character animations. In my case, since I am working on Selfish, the fish itself won’t have that complicated of an animation set, but even having a simple Idle animation would help the character feel more responsive.
Nick Valkov 