Hey everyone!

It's been quite a while since our devlog but this doesn't mean we were idling by. As you might know from our tweet Blue Flame is almost complete when it comes to coding and sprites, but the one of the most crucial part of the game was severely lacking. This was the animation of the characters. So, where were we and where we're progressing towards?

The Past

As you all well know, Blue Flame is a topdown shooter where you play as a pyromancer. For the longest time the characters looked like this:

Notice how each character had essentially removed limbs. This came from the use of Blender and pre-defined pixel art. We basically slapped the following file to a blender model, animated it as we saw fit, exported without the actual model and we had a pretty fluid sprite animation.

This allowed us to have 8 directional movement with a small amount of drawing, and if something wasn't looking that well all we needed is a little change in the animation process and we were golden. But of course this system wasn't without it's limitations. We could have added more parts to each character, because from these early models the arms and legs were missing - as you can see we only have hands and feet - we would still have one big issue, and that would be relatively flat object.

By flat object I mean, swords, spears, bows and the like. all of which would be a crucial part of Blue Flame since it has a  medieval/fantasy setting.  Even if we would have managed to get through the issue of flat elements - by the help of our artist who could just add the sword for example after the render was done -  it was still 8 directions, therefore a lot of work, and what's more crucial is the characters would still look a bit cartoonish. We needed to change it up a little.

What were our options?

Two things came to mind, one would be to leave it all to our artist but this also comes with the problem of time - remember, the Vertical Slice has to be ready before the end of October - and some more time on top of it. Plus a little change, for example a different color for the armor, would mean every animation will need a rework and that's just too much work and men-hour once again. So we were left with one option.

Enter the Blender-generated pixel art

While we know it will never be the same as a hand drawn pixel art, we started experimenting with different render options, here's how things progressed.

This was our reference model (prepare to see some genderless naked "butt"): 

We went through a few different rendering processes here's a few:

The issue with this Blender generated "pixel art" is that it's not perfect everywhere and if it's not perfect everywhere, we would still need to retouch it later, so after a lot of talking about it and re-talking it once again we actually decided to go with a contourless approach, as seen here:

In action our little blue dude looks something like this. After we settled on this rendering style we went a bit deeper into how the pre-render art should look like and after a little playing around here's what we got:

We turned this little fella into something more pixelated, more exactly into this guy:

Thank God it's pixelated, this dude is naked!

The pros and cons of this system

While we  have have something that's pretty usable a few things we have to consider, here's the quick pro and con of the system.

Pros

• Fast development of the animation and models
• Technically we could use 360 directional movement as well
• With a few clicks we can re-render every model with a different style if we found something more akin to pixel art
• Animations are more fluid, since we don't have to animate each frame

Cons

• It's not pixel art
• It doesn't mashes 100% with the background art, since it's automatically generated
• It's still not true pixel art

I'm interesting in hearing about your thoughts on this approach to animation in pixel art games, so don't be shy! :)

Steve

Blue Flame is a top-down action game made by a small Hungarian indie team where you're the only pyromancer in the World with the ability to cast warm fire, when every flame is cold. Get it for free at https://foxssake.itch.io/blue-flame