Welcome to Developer Diaries! This is an ongoing series where a member of the Twirlbound team shares insight on how we build our games and reveals some of what goes on behind the scenes in our projects.
Hey there, I’m Ciska and I’m an animator at Twirlbound! I’ve been in the industry for 4 years; you may have seen my work on Age of Wonders 4 and The Knightling. When I’m not animating, I dabble in a hundred hobbies like skating, dancing, drawing, making games, gardening, and so on! I hang out with my cat Poes a lot (her name means “cat” in Dutch).
As an animator at Twirlbound, I’m responsible for creating movement for all types of characters and sometimes objects in game. My fellow animator Lukas and I rig and animate characters delivered by our character artist Pascal. We usually start our animation process by shooting reference, trying to understand the movement and pushing that to make it look more appealing.
I loooved working on The Knightling because it had such a broad range of fun animation work! I worked on movement, combat, dialogue, and cinematics for humans but also a varying range of creatures in the game.
Being on a small development team like ours means keeping an open mind and seeing where my skills can be applied or help is needed, even if it’s outside my “official” job description. For example, during the development of The Knightling I rigged a creature for the first time (the Blowbug in the Cornered Bosk!), I sometimes drew concept art, and I picked up some marketing tasks (TikTok who?). I also had situations where I could apply specific skills: for example, my ballet experience caused me to have better insights on a certain enemy type with graceful movement/attacks. My experience with and passion for 2D animation also came to good use, which brings me to what I want to talk about today!
If you’ve played The Knightling, you’ve probably seen the little 2D animations on the loading screens. (but if you haven’t, it’s the animations I scattered all over this blog). I also made the animations at the end credits! I’m writing a bit about how they came into existence.
After watching so many people enjoy our demo at Gamescom 2024, we were really excited about releasing The Knightling. One thing became apparent from speaking to players at public showcase events: Audiences were surprised to find out a game like this was made by only 15 people. I started thinking about how important it was to present our game as it was: a very personal game born from passion! I figured having more “messy” handcrafted assets helps to make it feel more playful and personal.
I’ve always been a fan of the more handcrafted feel in games and animations, letting the indie and personality intentionally shine through. Inspirations like Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood’s ending titles and this music video for a Metronomy song gave me a really clear vision on how I wanted to add more playfulness to our loading screens.
However; when we were nearing the end of production, making polish-y things like this seemed low on the priority list. I pushed for it and the others seemed to agree that the loading screen and end credits could really solidify the sense of playfulness that our game is about. This was an exciting moment for me, it was the first time working in this team where I felt I was making a big difference!
My work process went something like this. I started by speaking with our concept artist Daphne, who had some ideas on how to visualize the Knightling in a simplified “chibi” style. We brought the face down to mainly eyes to be able to show emotions really well, and make it easier to animate (the more details, the more work, the more time… and I didn’t have all that much time).
I was used to animating on my Ipad in Procreate, which is the program I decided to use for this project (i wasn’t used to any other software). I would like to foreshadow that this wasn’t the best choice for this type of project: Procreate has no option for layers, and no batch export options. I also needed to do a lot of manual work to convert the files to sprite sheets that could be imported in Unity.
But Procreate is great in other ways. for example, I really love their Liquify tool, and I use it a lot when blocking out 2D animations! Their brush options are also great in my opinion. Another big reason I often end up choosing Procreate over other programs is that it’s portable tablet-based… I just love to shrimp it up on a couch or beany bag when I animate instead of sitting on an office chair, ergonomic style.
My approach for 2D animation is very different from 3D animation: you suddenly have a lot more liberty with your shapes. I started working from how I felt something should move, rather than first trying to copy how it actually moves. Pretty touchy-feely, but I feel like it makes a big difference.
Now for more technical pipeline takeaways: I’ve learned to make sure to first fully focus on animating the primary movement, and getting the timing right. I really make it quick and dirty, and use a deform or liquify type of tool as much as I can! This early in the process, drawing details only gives you less clarity to see if the movement you drew works. You really need to give your eyes the opportunity to focus on the main moving parts first.
Only then I focus on secondary movement, in my case the ribbon and the “skirt”. After that comes VFX if applicable, then I polish the lineart in a new layer and then I do colour! A tip for Procreate users: you can use animation layers when animating, but you need to create a new layer group for every frame to display 2 layers on one frame, which can cause a lot of annoying manual work.
Since that adventure I’ve switched to a program called Toonsquid, which seems very promising for a more professional pipeline. It has animatable layers and possibilities to add sound tracks, camera animation, and a bunch of other neat features.
An example of a blockout versus final animation!
When starting out in the games industry, I was fully focused on 3D animation. This is pretty standard for game animation and pretty much all animation these days. I never quit doing 2D on the side for fun, and it was so exciting for me to get the chance to do it professionally!
Now that I have more experience doing 2D, I run into more and more situations where my skills come in handy. For example, when the team needs visual support on movement or interaction ideas, animated concepts can be a lot stronger than still ones. Also, in many scenarios it’s faster to mock something up in 2D than in 3D. Another benefit of 2D is that you have full creative liberty over the motion you’re concepting, rather than having to work with the constraints of 3D. This is particularly useful when figuring out what creatures move like from scratch, and can help to plan out rigs.
But as I’ve experienced, even in mostly 3D style games, 2D animations can have a place to accentuate your game. The handcrafted feel of 2D animation is becoming more and more appreciated with the current rise of AI, and I feel people crave to recognize when art is made by real humans. My animations aren’t really perfect, but I think that adds to the project.
Thanks for reading my dev diary!! Below is a bonus shield sliding animation that never ended up getting implemented. I’m happy I still get to show it to you guys here!!
