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They main challenge I faced for this Ludum Dare was animating Zoltan’s cats. You see cats doing all the things cat do and I wanted them to look as real as possible. I’ve never done anything like this before and I’m so happy I did!

I’m a programmer, but the two Ludum Dare I’ve done so far I decided to challenge me with graphics: I wasn’t even sure this could be done properly in such a short time. So here is are a little series on my process, for those of you that would like to start making their own graphics.

This is not the right way or the only way to do it, but it worked! I was able to draw quickly with a good tradeoff between speed and quality.

You can find any kind of stock animation around, but making your own graphics is so satisfying and makes your game unique. So here is how you can do. Of course basic drawing skills are needed but not so crucial in my opinion, because even the strangest wobbly traced character will work well if it’s animated right.

First of all if you are serious about animation, grab this book.

It is the bible, you won’t probably need anything else. There are also great videos of it you can find on YouTube. The first and most important move you want to animate is walk. Turns out that walk cycles will be also the most difficult animation you will make, so start with it and everything will be easier after :) Bipeds walks are different from 4 leg walks, but they all have the so called “contact positions” that is when each foot touches the ground. A good way to start is to draw the contact position for each foot and then draw the position between the two, called “passing position”. The more frames you add the smoother your animation will be. An easy way to do this is getting an already made sprite sheet and studying it.

Trace on it! There’s nothing wrong. This way you’ll get familiar with the movement you are drawing.

For Zoltan I picked an old picture of animation studies that shows a rotoscope of cats and dogs jumping. In the early days of animation they would film everything to study the movements this way. And this is what you can do, even with a YouTube video.

Thanks for reading this and I really hope that if there’s an animator in you it will come out for a future jam! ;)

Coming up next: my first tries with cats!