Question Artwork in games such as Royal Match

Hello,

I'm in the final stages of a 2d project. In it, I've created 2d assets that are animated spritesheets, and I have created 2d animations that are done by animating in-house using scale, colour etc.

I'm a new father so I've had to resort to S***ty mobile games to pass the time at 3am whilst waiting for bottles to be finished, and I've downloaded Royal Match, not expecting much, it's put my game to absolute shame with the quality of it's artwork. Admittedly, their budget far outweighs mine, but I'm wondering if any of you fine folk know how they have created their characters, scenery and effects?

I'm starting to think they're actually 3d, with an isometric camera, but I'd love some clarification as I can't find anything online.

My project's artwork looks nice and works with the style we are going for, but I have been very limited with animation FPS, resolution and file size when it comes to using sprite sheets, and overall control when using the inhouse animations.

Cheers!

 

Well technically EVERYTHING in Unity is 3D. There actually is no Unity2D. That's not a thing.

But... as to the actual process used in particular games, I glanced at a quick Android gameplay of RM and the art is almost 99.9% sure to be simply 2D sprite cards with bones and really good animations and layering and lots of little wiggle and jiggle and juice added.

The reason it is unlikely to be 3D is that 3D art is far harder to work with and get looking right when used in a 2D game. It MIGHT be used in some stages of concepting or illustrating, but the final product is almost certainly just 2D cards with bones and animations.

AND... do not get discouraged. That team has been at it for YEARS and they have their craft finely tuned at this point. They also almost certainly have a dedicated set of artists to do the concepting / storyboarding, and once that is approved they make the basic resource sprites, then they pass it over to an animation team that goes nuts with all the pop / sizzle / juice.

Here's one talk:

 

Its just drawn and then animated in some software like after effects, or maybe even in engine

simple to say, for art you just have to be good at drawing and animating

maybe with AI you can try to take a shortcut now, ive seen pretty good stuff

 

Thanks for the replies guys. I'm a designer by trade so I'm capable of creating artwork like in Royal Match, what I am not capable of is getting it into Unity at the same high resolution/high fps due to the limits in sprite sheet sizes. For example I've got simple bushes that are blowing in the wind, and having a high FPS version of this made the sprite sheet way over 10,000 by 10,000, or an image size of 100's of MB's.

To get a reasonable quality vs size I've had to lower the dimensions and make them 12 fps.

Really struggling to get answers to this.

 

Are you doing traditional frame-by-frame animation? That's certainly NOT what is going on in today's games.

Look at the Spine2D animation package. That's how most of this stuff is done. Unity had a package called Anima2D but I think it got discontinued. There's a replacement of some kind but I'm not sure what it is or where it stands.

Basically you make a card sprite for each shape, compose them together, bone the shapes and animate the bones. Tiny, tiny, tiny.

 

Oh my days this makes so much more sense.

I've been asking questions on these forums for 3 years now Kurt and you have answered every single one with clinical precision haha.

Thank you so much for this. I'm happy to move forward with this new information, and upset that I've spent so much time elsewhere in the project when this was the answer all along.

 

Hey thanks, glad to be of help. Gamedev is a fun journey with more stuff than any one of us will ever be able to learn, so it's awesome to share useful knowledge with fellow devs, especially because it helps me keep up with it!

Animating "really good" 2D stuff is almost its own black magic. We have some phenomenal 2D animators on our staff and when I look at what they do, I swear they are doing it in 3D.

As with everything it is all about clever insight into how to break stuff up, adding extra shadows or segments, bending stuff in just the right way at just the right spot... it truly is an artform AND a science to get good technical 2D animation working. Iterate, iterate, iterate.

 

Yes I'm hoping this unity package is similar to external programs. Animation is all about trickery of the eye, like you say, small shadows here, small bevel there tricks the brain into all sorts of magic. Hoping to be able to transfer my skills from the adobe suite into Unity now. I created some nice things in there that I guess I simply need to chop up and import to Unity, then animate in this Spine 2D package.

Looking forward now to a 60fps vibrant background as opposed to the current one - which actually wasn't too bad all things considered, and did have a nice aesthetic, just not the modern slick one we initially aimed for. Thanks again Kurt, I'm sure we'll meet again!