Animation Impact

Hey everyone, I’m Jared Williams, Animator for Eleventh Hour Games. I hold a software engineering degree from the University of Phoenix. My animation technique and skill has been refined underneath the mentorship of Mark Pullyblank, SFX Director & Animator for Avatar, and Jason Shum, Senior Animator of Riot Games and now Senior Animator at Blizzard Entertainment. Under their direction, I’ve found a deep passion in my animation craft and as such, hold my work to a high standard.

 

Today I want to discuss the current state of animations in Last Epoch and what I would like to accomplish in the near future. As a fan community, I think we can all agree that animations for every Action RPG have been lacking. It is my personal goal to change this perception through my work on Last Epoch. Our team strives to be responsive to all game feedback but I’m asking you, Travelers, to hold me accountable for any sub-par animations by leaving comments in the forum or in our Discord.

Since Diablo’s release, the animation pipeline hasn’t seen much innovation – something I find particularly unsettling from a professional perspective. The animation pipeline for ARPGs look something like this:

 

  1. Idle/Run
  2. Anticipation
  3. Hit
  4. Idle/Run
 

My ideal future state would look like this:

 

  1. Idle/Run
  2. Anticipation
  3. Hit
  4. Settle
  5. Anticipation
  6. Repeat 3-5
 

This change in the pipeline would make the next attack start from Anticipation and create a much more dynamic animation. You can see this in action here (3:33):The Best Animation Tricks of the Trade (For 2016) - YouTube

So, the team is aware of the animation state in the demo and have identified short, medium, and long-term improvements to add to our roadmap. My goal is to address the short-term improvements inside the Kickstarter time frame (by May 17th!) so you can catch a glimpse of what the future holds on release. I will be hosting Animation Chats with our Discord community in the Last-Epoch-General channel every Wednesday at 9:30 AM CST to discuss the progress of Animation, collect feedback from our players on what you would like to see and what isn’t working, and showcase concept animations.

Join us! Drop your questions in the comments. Stay safe, Travelers!