Ancient Enemy Dev diary #3: How to create dynamic poses in your game
We’ve been having a lively discussion today about character poses in games so we thought we’d share some of our experiences. You may find this instructive, or amusing, or both!
Slightly batty
In our previous game Shadowhand, we went to a lot of trouble to get aspects of the stances as accurate and lifelike as we could. The types of thing we looked at were angles of limbs in active poses, hand grips on weapons, and scale.
On our Watermill level, we have a Washerwoman character who battles the protagonist with a laundry bat. This was a kind of wooden paddle used in that time period (1770s) to beat and agitate laundry in large vats of water – thankfully most of us have washing machines that do this job today!
To get the pose and hand grip right, Helen posed with a cricket bat and we sent the images, along with detailed costume and character art references, to our artists at Retrostyle Games. The final character poses are below.
Developers are willing to go to great lengths to make games!
Ancient Enemy
Our artist Jen is doing a great job on our fight stances for our next game, Ancient Enemy.
Here are some of the poses she has come up with so far:
Dynamic poses present some challenges but we think they really add a lot to the game!
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