FREEDOM - Action Platforming Adventure

Hello community members,

I am the Cruelty, i am an active member on the council of bird lords. Recently one of our highest respected members, Canary Harry, performed an indecency so unheard of, that he was thrown into jail in one of our deepest and most secure dungeons.

I'm here to see if any of you fine people are willing to put some sense into him, here are some shots of crimes he performed lately to help me you understand the depth of the situation (you must click these as it transports you to our crime collection servers):

https://gfycat.com/ReliableImpartialDiamondbackrattlesnake
https://gfycat.com/ScrawnyGraveCrocodileskink

and here is a link to the video feed into his brain, through neural uplink. You have control of all his motor skills if he chooses to act out, take control.

http://gamejolt.com/games/freedom/149028

------------THE 4TH WALL HAS BEEN BROKEN------------
Alright so, this game we made for AdventureJam and ToJam (it started in ToJam) and have been working on for about 5 days now give or take.
It's a game where you are Canary Harry, and you must climb up to "freedom" which we are still implementing a lot of the Win conditions and lore (we've got some voice recorded and some dialogue written for a beginning cutscene) that you'd expect.

Try out the game, give any feedback as it is greatly appreciated!
We wanna see if people like this, and what they like about it in particular, or if they like it at all!

Additionally, this game was built on a custom voxel engine one of my friends FuelTR has made, if you wanna contact him, send him a message on GameJolt (look in the comments section).

Thanks for reading and hope to hear more from you!

 

Maybe consider changing the name - from canary harry to tendonitus turkey or bursitis buzzard, you know - because the animations are extremely stiff and linear.

Joking aside the animations are unimpressive. Very stiff and linear.
This is understood - the graphic style was used based on your friends engine however while watching the links above the only thought beyond - are these animations intentionally created like this - was why is this voxelized? It is really visually unappealing and distracting.
Most (50%?) voxel games are voxels for a reason - one being so the engine can draw large areas and keep frame rates from dropping into single digits.
I dont see why this is a voxel game.

This feedback might be considered harsh - though you did ask for ANY feedback so this is just truthful unbiased feedback.

 

Lmao fair enough,
Maybe some background info would be useful here. I am not an animator, two programmers made this thing which have little to no skill in art. We had no choice because we couldn't get any artists on board that could help us fully realize anything past a certain point. However, this doesn't mean that i wouldn't take any sort of suggestion on making it feel and look better. Could you give me some pointers on how to fix this "stiff and linear" animation? Are my curves just the problem? Not enough acceleration on the movements? Or is the problem to do with the fact that my hands aren't jointed?
What if the style we were going for is very DOOM-esque, kinda primitive but just modern enough...?

Secondly, for the "why is this a voxel game" argument. This is because the game features deep mechanics around voxels, as you can see, the health bar for enemies is actually a critical point WITHIN them. This makes very dynamic health bars that people can take multiple approaches to getting inside of. We clearly haven't explored just everything you could do with this system, but even the ability to dig through maps and giving ability to certain enemies to be able to break more or less could turn out to be very interesting in the long run. Additionally, with little or no knowledge of modelling, we were able to pump out 3 floors in a relatively short time and UV map them any way we wanted (though we had no real time to make each floor customized so the UV maps have just been copy pasta'd).

Thanks for the feedback!

 

Have you heard of the principles of animation?
Apply as many as you can to the animations and they will be improved 100%.

 

This looks like a great little introduction, i'll keep searching it up and studying slowly. What 3d animation software would you recommend?

 

Yeah - this is good.
Software doesn't matter, whichever package you feel most comfortable in.

For your animations you already have, focus on arcs, timing, follow through / overlapping, easing and secondary motion. All other principles are good to have in animations also, but some principles have to be limited for real-time cycles.