Lesson 20: Character Attack Animation

Why do people love playing games? Because games are full of animation, with visual appeal rivaling cartoons.

Animation intimidates many people, but it's really just a sequence of individual drawings played in succession.

As long as you can draw a single picture, you can make animation, and you can make games. You don't even need to have studied art --- just use the natural human instinct to imitate!

The simplest character animation is a stick figure. Once you learn stick figures, you can make games. And stick figures have no copyright; draw and use them however you like.

1. Standing Frame

Use different colors to suggest different body parts. Break the character into head, body, limbs, and weapon.

Once you have a standing pose, you can start making animation.

Attack animation can be simply divided into 3 parts:

1. Wind-up (bosses always have a startup pose before a big move; players have one too, but it's usually shorter)

2. Strike (this is the attack frame --- touch it and you lose health or the game ends)

3. Recovery (this can be understood as hit-stun; generally after a boss uses a big move, there are a few recovery frames, and that's when players can beat on the boss)

1-3 frames for each part is enough.

2. Wind-up

To chop forward, you need to lean back first.

3. Strike

The character leans forward and chops out, adding a red slash effect for better results.

Add 1 frame of retracting the slash.

4. Recovery / Hit-stun

After the chop ends, the character needs to return to the standing pose; this is the intermediate state.

Play the drawn frames in sequence, and it becomes an attack animation ready for use in a game.

Of course, once you learn animation, making a few-minute short animation is also possible.

Character Two-Stage Attack Animation Demo

Character 7-Frame Attack Explanation

Homework

Use the method introduced in this lesson to create a character attack animation.