Hangry Chicken - Character Animations

Hey there! Elliot once again here from the Hangry Chicken Dev team!

In this post I'll be following up from my discussion about the redesign process for the games character by talking about making their animations.  For most The most part, enemies were only given one animation that would play as they move about the level, while the players character had an animation depending on how they move, including a walk, jump and a hover, though the hover animation didn't end up being used.  

The Chicken

The  chicken was the hardest and most time consuming to animate, as her animations needed to be longer and she had multiple whereas the other characters usually only had one.  For the chickens walk cycle I initially tried to animate her running, but despite using reference I just couldn't get it right, and I ended up only doing a walk cycle which was much more simple to animate.  Her jump animation was pretty straight forward and didn't require any reference, it was simply a matter of animations principles.

The Foxes and the Eagle
Both the foxes and eagle only have one animation, and this is dues to the fact that they are constantly moving. The foxes have a simple 4 frame run animation that loops as the move about, while the eagle has a 4 frame fly animation and also an idle pose.  For the foxes I used the same piece of video reference of a real fox running, while for the eagle I used a series of images of an eagles wings in a different positions to try and get the shape of the wings correct with in the animations. 

The Snakes
For the snakes I only had to create an idle animation and an animation where the mouth opens as they shoot projectiles in-game.  I used no reference for this and instead tried to make a sort of head bobbing motion for the idle, which plays whenever they are not attacking the player.  The shooting animation is a simple two frame open and close animation for the mouth that plays whenever they shoot.

At them moment most of the animations are pretty stiff, but they work well enough that they can still be used in game. Later on, after the semester of If  I get time before it ends, I may come back and smooth them out by adding more frames, and fixing some posing issues but for now, I think they work pretty well.