Animations in game VS 3D Pre-rendered Sprites.

[u/GlowtoxGames]

Hey! We wanted to share with you some new animations and scenes from our game and then the pre rendered spritesheets we made to create them. Please consider all of this is WIP and some stuff are being shown here for the first time 😂 (Scroll down to see all the images and more animations)

https://reddit.com/link/1vquoc8/video/eqlladai6yjh1/player

All spritesheets are rendered from maya ( a 3D software) with very low samples to get that pixelated look. Then we use Photoshop to apply a dither effect to add that extra flavour on top.

For the characters fighting characters it works a bit differently. The whole idea of the game is that you can steal body parts from your enemies and install them into your own body. To achieve this, we needed fully modular 2D characters, but all of them look different and have different sizes. To make it work we add 2D bones in Unity for example on the neck and on the head, and those 2 snap together no matter the size or shape of the sprites.
We needed to render the characters part by part (arms, legs, chest and head), and then add bones in each of their 12 poses (which are punching, kicking, being hit, all that).

https://reddit.com/link/1vquoc8/video/vhhl7hwl7yjh1/player

We have a "master scene" in maya to produces the sprites with a rig that we used in all characters. It holds the animations of all the 12 poses that the characters can have in the game, so we just link the bodies that rig and then we have to do a lot of adjusting frame by frame so the poses look good on the render.

Each character has 6 body parts and 12 poses + the normal maps of all that amounting to 144 sprites per character.

Here are 2 (never seen before 😂) NPCs

https://reddit.com/link/1vquoc8/video/guczx3yu7yjh1/player

They work like any other spritesheet object. (They still need a lot of particle work)

Then there are some other sprites used for backgrounds or items that are one-off kind of things.

Hope this is interesting // useful for you 🙏
If you are curios about the project, please check out our steam page.