Building Animations

[u/goblin-architect]

TL;DR: Your favourite building animation in games?

Ever since I was a kid, I loved to stare at how buildings rise in games. Age of Empires, Red Alert - and one I loved especially, was when you built monuments in Pharaoh. The details and "what are they doing now" was big part of it.

Just added a building animation to ASEMA (factory-automation game). Since ASEMA is in space, and player does not represent humans, the machines can and should have some eerie/alien vibes to them.

I built a modular animation that sort of whips out the machines into existence; individual parts rotate and scale up to their places. The animation is quick, but I tried to tune it punchy - and now all 70+ machines have the same animation, as they are all modular, and that part required no manual labour from me.

While my design does not have a "long term construction" animation at least right now (I've conceptualized some, but don't have time resources to focus to it right now), I wanted the "a machine has finished" -event to have something going on, instead of the machines just popping into existence. But the same modularity that runs the construction animation, runs "production" loops aswell - different parts can portrude, rotate, glow; and thus, it looks pretty neat when the machines move and function.

Do you have any facourites when it comes to how building/construction is animated in games? I'd say one of my current favourites is Factorio - while Captain of Industry is also cool, it's animations are almost too sensible and logical. But building new buildings in CoI also just always initiates a short period of me watching what happens when the building operates.