Unspoken Standard of Animation

Last E3, my business partner and I, noticed a pretty consistent thing about all the top tier games. NO it wasnt how cinematic they were, nor the quality of graphics. It was the shear depth and quality of animation.

Till recently many games just made the player character turn to the desired direction and let it go, which resulted in something that looked like the main character was doing one of those spinning ice skater moves. Its always been pretty bad, but people just sort of accepted it. Apparently not anymore.

Moving forward it will probably set a new standard for animation requirements for anyone doing a game from a 3rd person perspective, and  not just the ones the publishers with infinite resources can produce.

Noted: It was then I planned to look at what I could do to keep our future projects on par.
The obvious answer is to do it like the big boys,  MoCap sessions and a middleware solutions like Euphoria. But we're Indy, and Indy practically equates to poor (at least starting out), and there really isn't a good and cheap solution for getting that level of animation without doing it by yourself, and if you do out all yourself and do it "by hand." I have to wonder if anyone would respect it.

Regardless, I'm creating a new foundation that can support more animation heavy games to come. It'll probably be featured in a few of Killjoy's prime projects. So for the last day and a half, I've been animating and scripting out one of the most basic character movements. Turning. I have to say its been pretty interesting. It's easy enough to animate the actions, but building code that allows game characters to know their left from their right has proven pretty tricky.