How it was made- Beast Man (Character Animation Pack)

A behind the scenes look into the creation of an asset pack

1. Introduction

2. Designing for practicality

3. Animation process

4. Setting up the Page

5. What’s next?

1. Introduction

This character, BeastMan, is the start of my character animation series!

This asset pack’s primary feature is to showcase Platformer movement animations in conjunction with Smoke FX and future Tileset/Code/VFX asset packs. Its purpose is to help game dev’s game jams and prototypes feel fun and exciting.

But it also serves as practice material for me, and I myself can utilize these assets for my own tutorials/game-jams too. Now, that’s what I call a win, win situation!

2. Design for Feasibility

As someone with little experience animating characters, yet alone designing them, coming up with a simple yet effective design was the most important step.

These characters needed to share a universal design while expressing unique traits that gave them a niche purpose. Here’s what I came up with:

I settled for a minimal, yet bold color palette. Red is the main hue with 3 shades, black is for the body, and white is the highlight with purple as the shade.

The visual design centers around a circular, hollow face with the rest of the body designed around the character’s purpose in a game.

In the particular case for BeastMan, I settled for a small yet energetic character resembling a beast-like animal. It reminds me of a hedgehog that is known to go….fast, real fast.

Animation Process

With the character designs completed. it was now time to bring the static drawings to life.

As somebody who has little experience animating characters, I approached it using first principles thinking.

I followed this train of thought to guide me during this animation process:

1. Establish the character’s purpose

2. Utilize distinct features to personify its purpose

3. Exists in a realistic world, therefore physics applies to everything

4. Start with frames that lead up to the current animation.

5. Keyposes should be distinct enough to differentiate each animation

6. Animations are a blend between the starting frame, key poses, and end frames.

Page Design

I’ve recently have been redesigning my Itchio pages to be more coherent and follow a common theme. So I simply copy and pasted most of the text panel graphics and CSS from my other pages onto this one.

So the primary focus was to write the contents of the page, upload all the gifs, and design the primary icon.

HTML5 Demo

Something I never had for my projects is a playable browser demo. I’ve been putting it off for quite some time so with a playable character ready, now was the time.

I dusted off an old Gamemaker 2 template I made many years ago and began implementing the animations, tweaking the code, and tilesets.

Here’s how it came out after a day of implementation!
Not too shabby, but it needed a ton of work. Things such as turning animations, ledge grabbing, super jumps, dodge rolling, and more, were missing.

These are things I would have never known, so moving forward, implementation is a MUST for all projects. It’s the only way to improve the quality of my work.

What’s Next?

Now that my first playable character has been animated, it’s time to create the world around it!

The next two assets will focus on templates to start from foundational concepts. This allows us all to reference these templates to save TONS of time when creating more complex things.

Thank you for reading, catch you on the next one!