Guild Wars Animation Q&A
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Q: How difficult is it to design animations that fit the gameplay? Guild Wars combat is somewhat fast paced, with skills that sometimes take just a second to launch. There must be an idea of what the animation should look like, and the length it has to last?
HP: In games, player control is the most important thing, and for an animator starting in the games industry, that's the most difficult thing to learn. One of the key principals of traditional animation is Anticipation -- the long wind-up before a punch or the exaggerated crouch before a big jump that really sells the motion. Unfortunately, in a game, this sort of delay in action bogs things down and irritates the player, so you have to learn other tricks. Ultimately, you have to learn to create a convincing, visually interesting animation within whatever time constraints you're given. How you work within those constraints is what separates good game animation from bad.
SM: Gameplay animation is definitely its own discipline. Although it shares all the same principles with traditional (or film) animation, game animation employs them differently. As Heron mentioned, anticipation is huge, but game animation is so quick and gameplay so integral that you don't have the opportunity (without making the game lag) to employ it the same way.so you do it differently, instead of the character winding up into this big antic pose, you start off in that pose and then let the engine blend into it from the idle. The effect isn't quite as fluid as film, but at least you have the build up and release.
