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What's Shank art technique?


TuKanime

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As a huge fan and an indie game developer, I would love to know about it, since concepts to implementation.

Shank has a great flowing animation, I love it. Can Klei team or someone explain deep details about art development in this post? Please?  :juggling: 

I mean, answers like how many frames used for walking,jumping? fps? Sprite sheet size? Other techniques?

 

Thanks in advance.
TuKanime

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Hey there! Thanks for reaching out! Our artists work in Flash, and then run custom export scripts that write out the symbols and animations to custom data files which the game can load. In general, each frame of animation is constructed from various symbols (arms, legs, hands, torso, etc...) which allows us to apply different "costumes" to the characters in the game without having to re-animate the character. 

 
Beyond that, all of our artists that worked on most of our games are classically trained animators. They love drawing and 2D traditional animation, and they tried to approach everything on Shank and Shank 2 with that mentality. 
 
You'll also find in-depth notes on a presentation that our Creative Director Jeff Agala, and Animator Aaron Bouthillier did about 2D animation at Klei for GDC 2014. You can find the presentation notes in the GDC Vault.
 
We hope this has been helpful TuKanime!
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Hi, I checked the presentation and Ace'spot blog and I just want to ask a few questions so I am sure about style.

 

Your first make rough animation frame by frame? You have animation sheet with poses?

Then you get it into flash and divide each keyframe into symbols?

And then you make symbol animation and that allows you to change specific symbols without need to redo animation and it looks nice and fluid because frame by frame animation was used as base for it?

Do you use symbol animation for enemies too?

 

Thanks for all info you shared so far, it is really interesting topic and that presentation about your animation is great :D and Shank and Mark of the Ninja both look nice so it is fun to learn more about those games and how they come to life.

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Hi, I checked the presentation and Ace'spot blog and I just want to ask a few questions so I am sure about style.

 

Your first make rough animation frame by frame? You have animation sheet with poses?

Then you get it into flash and divide each keyframe into symbols?

And then you make symbol animation and that allows you to change specific symbols without need to redo animation and it looks nice and fluid because frame by frame animation was used as base for it?

Do you use symbol animation for enemies too?

 

Thanks for all info you shared so far, it is really interesting topic and that presentation about your animation is great :grin: and Shank and Mark of the Ninja both look nice so it is fun to learn more about those games and how they come to life.

 

That's basically it, first we rough out character designs, then we build a pose library, then we animate those symbols frame-by-frame and create new symbols as needed. It's the same process for all characters in the game, including all enemies.

 

Thanks again so much for the kind words everyone! 

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