Elements Character Progress

Hello.

I'll be honest up-front: I was hoping to have a lot more to show you with today's update. This project is behind where I wanted it to be at this point.

(Feel free to skip ahead to the progress images if that's what you're here for-- )

I believe in transparency and honesty. So no excuses, but explanations:

Reason number 1: I lost a few weeks due to burnout. Sometimes it happens, and imo the best thing is to own it rather than make additional excuses: There was a week or two back there when I didn't get much of anything done and procrastinated by playing a lot of Minecraft 🤫... and then to jumpstart myself I focus-switched to my platformer project for another week. 

I already mentioned this previously-- and it's passed now-- so I won't dwell on it. But that leads into the other thing: I got my second wind but then had to channel it into some other things:

Reason number 2: I've had to focus on some commission projects that have a more fixed deadline. Lately I've been turning down additional commission requests, especially from non-patrons. Still, I have a couple of long-term projects that I'd already committed to. Because of those things that have more concrete deadlines, the easiest thing to push aside has been this Elements project-- if only because it's so big anyways.

Note: Throughout all of this, this patreon page is my number one priority-- I consider the regular updates every week-- the patron requests-- to be my main focus, and I won't miss those updates. Everything else (large asset pack projects like this, or commissions, etc) -- are in addition to that. When I talk about 'burnout' and such, it's specifically for these projects that I work on outside of the "office hours" for the regular patron posts. 

And we've had a great month of consistent releases this March, so no worries about the regular content. ;)

Note 2: Just to get ahead of this -- sometimes I see artists talking about how they feel pressured or it's hard for them to create when people ask for progress updates: ex "How goes the new style?" ; "Looking forward to the new style!" ; etc-- I've seen twitter threads from artists who for some reason don't like that...

That is not a problem for me: In fact, this stuff only helps keep me on track-- and I'm happy to be transparent about the progress, especially since I know that some people are planning projects based around the assets I release.

So don't feel any need to worry about my feelings LOL. Give me that kick in the butt. 💪🤠

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OK-- enough of the blah-blah. You want to see what I DID get done since the last update.

More Animations:

I ended the previous update with a list of possible animations that I might include, and I read through the patron comments and put a lot of consideration into the suggestions and reasoning that was shared there.

First, let's look at the regular attack animation:

There's an additional frame for wind-up/anticipation. This was discussed in the previous thread, and there seemed to be a lot of reasons to include it-- it could be used to differentiate heavy vs light sword attacks by omitting or including it, and this frame could potentially have multiple uses, especially with different timing. This animation could also be used for fishing, or throwing fireballs, so that versatility is worthwhile. 

Glad I went through with this based on patron  suggestions!

If you compare the above animation to the one from last time, you'll see that I also changed the north-facing motion. The new one isn't as clean, but it matches the other directions better, so that the motion is the same with the same frames for each direction.

Next up: new animations:

Jumping. As discussed in the previous thread, this one makes sense again because of the versatility. Individual frames from this animation could have different uses in different contexts. For example, the crouch frame could be really useful on its own.

Here you can see the crouch frame alone, as well as two other new single-frame poses:

Here are two downed/KO positions: one laying face-down and one face-up. The crouch frame transitions decently into the face-down pose. And of course the idea is that the face-up position could also be used for sleeping in bed.

Bow Animations:

These are really difficult. I'll admit that these animations are the main cause for the burnout mentioned above: it's not easy for these to look good in the north/south directions at this small resolution.

This is what I have right now-- this is what the animation looks like without any weapon overlay:

Maybe more useful in context, with a bow in hand:

In the above animation, there are two variations. The top one is more like the bow animation used in the Time Fantasy battlers-- where the bowstring is invisible so that you can better see the character sprite itself. I tried putting a clear bowstring on the second one just to see how it looked; I think it came out OK in the side-view, but again the north/south somehow look really goofy...

To be honest-- I don't like either of them LOL-- I might revisit this one entirely. Would love to know what you think.

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OK-- that's it for now. Sorry for the wait for such a small update... hopefully the animated preview images are enough for now. As always, please give feedback and ideas based on these. It does help (and I think that these new animations show how useful the comments on the previous thread were).

I'll be back on Wednesday with the end-of-month thread. See you soon.

Thanks!