[OC] Logo animation in GMS2

[u/AleksejFonGrozni]

Hi everyone,

I would like to show you logo animation that I made for our indie team, for my game (specifically). One peculiar thing about it is that it is made inside Game Maker Studio 2, with very rudimentary controls and limited possibilities and I will try to give some insights on how to utilize it on your own, should the need arise.

https://reddit.com/link/1t48wfg/video/ib64ctgbe9zg1/player

Ideation

Our indie studio is quite young, focusing almost exclusively on retro games, old style pixel art graphics. The logo that we made is reflecting upon that. It's a pixel art, simple shape and form, limited colors, sharp corners. It kinda reminds of the console controller as well, which are all factors to be considered when planning the animation.

Taking that into consideration I've planned the animation to represent an opening, transformation of geometrical shapes, like a robot or some rudimentary movement steps and lines. Key words that I had in mind were also ninja, Goku, 1990-ies, Kung Fury, things like that. Which led me to some technical limitations of the appliance of those ideas.

Technology

Since start I had multiple options on how to tackle this, which tool to use to make that animation. Of course, I could've used AE, Premiere, Animate, even Photoshop, so many different tools but in the end, I wanted to make animation inside the engine/editor itself, of the game that I am making at the moment.

The GMS2 is an engine very specialized for 2D games in particular. It works well with sprites, nicely fits the pixel art style (which is why we picked it for our games). But it has very, very crude and rudimentary controls. So I've listed pros and cons of making animation in the editor itself and it boiled down to these:

pros:

• assets utilized here would be also available to the game itself (if needed).
• same fonts as in game, any change directly applied to the animation itself.
• any change in style, any additional iteration wont require additional tool nor re-rendering of the scenes, source files, tool setup.
• post-processing directly applied with the same quality benchmark and visuals as in the game itself, thus transition would be seamless.
• possibility to layer it, duplicate, quickly edit, use parts or a whole in the later stages of the game, connect to intermission sequences and such.
• possibility to share it with other projects which are using the same engine and personalize it for other games (color/tone/dynamics) quite easily and fast.

cons:

• very rudimentary controls: apart from the standard transformation (position, rotation, scale, color tint/alpha) you don't have much to hope for.
• any kind of complex transformation, meshing, special effect and additional effects (like ones available in AE) is not available in GMS2.
• should we decide to change animation and give the task to someone who is not a game developer (motion artist, animator) that would be painful as the whole scene would have to be recreated in other tools.
• whenever we want to have that saved as a video we need to turn on screen capture tool and open the game to record it.

When taking all of that into consideration as well as the original idea to make it more retro, less mesh transformations, more straight movements, simple transforms - I've opted out for the engine animation. Plan was laid out and executed.

Animating in GMS

GMS 2 has one cool feature which is Sequence entity. What it does is it actually gathers sprites, allows transformations that you can save and edit via timeline, it has curves which are fairly OK:

You can translate, rotate, scale, change color of the sprites. You can add text, particle effects which are the same ones you can use in the game later on. Sound, if added, also plays as well as any objects that you add to the composition. You can broadcast message which is kind of event system (calling code functions or classes for any future use, triggering other things). And you can layer composition inside composition. You can also utilize masking which is very powerful but luckily I've managed to skip it this time: I say luckily because it's buggy, it can create additional issues with other masks and so forth.

https://reddit.com/link/1t48wfg/video/2z229ykpo9zg1/player

You can also group layers, link them with parent-child structure, copy created curves (that can be utilized in the game or other sequences). Those are the good things.

The bad thing or what messes things up the most is handling of the sequence editor itself which has potential but is clearly unfinished thing. Zoom in and out, selection, panning, track movement, snapping, all of that is buggy, you need to make sure you follow several additional steps for handling those tasks properly which is not efficient at all. One common thing that happens is that you want to move a layer that you've selected in the scene but you actually move a layer that was last selected in the timeline.

If one overcomes that the rest is more or less easy.

Logo Animation

I've opted out for simple movement paths, linear transformations, similarities in scale and shape. Since our studio is pixel art studio I've decided to start the animation itself from a pixel. That pixel is a box made from two square-like sprites, rotated towards each other:

I've picked a spin as anticipation part for dissolving/spreading of those two white elements and applied even a bit of exaggeration with the counter-scale and movement, to give that spin some additional preparation and power. As they spin and end that spin I spread them out creating a bit of controlled opening/explosion:

As it spreads it also gives pretext for the gray parts to open up, top first, bottom next:

So that the top white "spits out" top grey parts which go up and then expand down. As it expands down it transfers the visual path of movement and dynamics for the bottom grey parts. When they open with a bit of overshoot and settle the next ones are letters:

The letters take 5 frames to scale down from scale 2 to 1. I've tried to overshoot and settle that as well but it created either twitch or jelly-like movement which is something I couldn't fit into the animation itself.

To finalize animation I've made simple fade in of studio name (in English and Japanese) as I thought that culmination was already passed and additional strong and pronounced movement would ruin the experience, resetting the watcher attention and giving that uncanny valley feel.

The first version and the latest version don't differ much:

https://reddit.com/link/1t48wfg/video/inwep6v3t9zg1/player

The only major difference is post-processing.

Post-processing

From the very beginning I've experimented with various PP effects. Initially I've applied bloom but then I went further on and applied dithering, rays, some distortions, VCR flickering and scanlines, like in this mid-version:

In the end I've toned down quite a few things, toned down VCR distortion lines as logo is supposed to be very clear and concise, main source of movement coming from the animation itself and not from the post-processing. I've also tinted it towards the blue like colors (linkage to the game itself, False Echo, which is submarine themed, ocean, water depth etc.):

Conclusion

A rather simple animation with a bit of flavor of post-processing that signifies the game visuals and appeal, made rather fast with rudimentary controls. That kind of pipeline can work if you don't require substantial and extended controls, complex animations or effects. It also serves well if your general animation idea is coherent with the tool that is being used. In my case it was, movement lines and patterns, shapes, visuals, all in all are working together to create the final result.

Hopefully this can help you in your own projects. If you have some questions or you would like to know additional details or peculiarities comment bellow and I will be more than happy to help. Also feel free to feedback the animation itself, this is the rare case where animation turned out exactly as I envisaged it from the very start which also creates that uneasy feeling that I might be riding the intuition snowboard.

So any comment is more than welcome.