anna_svecova 363 Posted April 5 Ahoy Ylanders! Today’s dev diary will be about how we created life and populated Ylands with various creatures. We believe the visual style of Ylands is best suited for hand-keyed animations. We decided not to use mocap in development as the cartoonish animation style brings more freedom for us as creators and is the only way to achieve the desired animations in many cases. Can you imagine someone could train and force an endangered species like a Pangolin to do a special attack in mocap? (big grin) Yeah, we can't either... So it is also very humane and no animal (or monster) was harmed in the process of animation. When we want to get an animal into the game we first work with references. We try to get as many videos, movies, and pictures as we can. That way we can establish the character and behavior of the animal. If we have a clear character for it, most of the work will be much easier as we know what we want to achieve. We animators need to interpret the character of the animal as we are a type of actors who are not standing in front of a camera but are comfortably hidden behind our computer screens. We don’t experience stage fright, that's cool, isn’t it? For some animals, it is easy to get inspiration as we have them at home, or a nearby zoo, for some it is more difficult like the Pangolin we already mentioned. Sometimes, it is outright impossible to get a real-life reference, such as when we introduced alien animals. But this also has a positive side: if there is no reference for the animal/monster, we can use our imagination! And that’s so much fun! After that, it’s pretty straightforward. We have to make a set of 23 animations that we need for monsters - for example, various attacks, walking, running, and idle variants. For tamable animals, we need a few more animations, and for mountable animals, we need up to 32 animations. Making those hand-keyed animations can take up from 2 to 5 weeks. As all entities share almost the same amount of animations it gives you, the player, the freedom to make animals behave as you wish in the Editor. You can force the peaceful rabbit to behave like a rabid monster. And that is what we like at Ylands, it is your call, your game! So go on, find them, take screenshots, can you count how many animals and monsters are in our game? That's all for this week! Stay Classy! 4 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
