When I started prototyping Gunboat God and I was figuring out the mechanics, the style was already firmly set in my mind. I knew I wanted to use a strong silhouette style with a 3D-to-2D workflow. This was a great excuse to have heaps of characters to animate to make the game burst off the screen, but it also supported the genre of the game.

For each character-enemy, I have four enemy types to choose from. Birds (Woodlands biome), water-based (Waterways biome), boat-based mutants (Marshlands biome) and aircraft-based mutants (Ruins biome). Then I simply decide on a thematic attack and get to work on the character’s first pass animations. These are low-effort “blocking” animations that I can quickly create and export to test in the game.

This streamlines the entire workflow, since I know that once I’m programming the character and implementing its animations, there will be a lot of detailed adjustment to movement, attack timings, and even the size of the character. Once the “first pass” programming is done, I switch back over to “second pass” animations, which is the polishing phase. Once I’m happy with the animations, I re-export for “second pass” programming. This is my special sauce for character development. Call it a one-two-punch workflow. So the breakdown is:

• Animation first pass (animation blocking)
  
• Programming first pass (getting the enemy movement, behaviour, collision and effects working)
  
• Animation second pass (animation polish)
  
• Programming second pass (refining health and damage numbers, movement, etc.)

After some time strictly following this workflow and getting comfortable with it, I was able to entirely develop a character in 2-5 days, depending on the size. Some small bird or fish characters would take 2 days, and larger humanoid characters would take between 3-5 days. Reasonably streamlined!

Then there are sound effects and vocals to be implemented, but I generally work on those at random times so it gels with a lot of other development work.

When I start working on a character’s animation, I first establish the “golden pose”. I take my time iterating and refining this pose, as it serves as a sort of style guide for the character’s animation set. Almost all of the characters have an idle, hit-react and attack animation, so once the golden pose is ready, those are the first things I animate. Then I move onto miscellaneous animations like airborne-flop (fish enemy), melee stab (knives enemy), or overboard and drown animations (various boat enemies).

These animations are playblasted and imported to Photoshop as individual frames, where I wrote a script to clean up and export sprite sheets that can be easily imported into Game Maker.

Finally, in Game Maker, the animations need to be added to their respective texture groups (eg: bird character animations, water enemy animations etc.), their pivot points and collision masks need to be set, and their frame rate needs to be set. Then on to programming.

I hope this didn’t seem too glossed over. I’m restraining myself from making the blogs 100x times bigger since time is scarce. If you have any questions, let me know!

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Best,
Tom