Background: Game is grid based RPG. Question: How important is it that there is animation in this type of game? I mean walking animations and fighting animations etc. Would any of you simple drop the game if you started playing and found the player moved from one tile to another with no animation? Personally it does not bother me (and unfortunatly the current game design makes it hard to implement) so I was contemplating leaving animation out (or at least a later version) but I don''t want to be turning off lots of gamers. -Greg

Depends. What are you going for with this game? If you want something cool to put in your portfolio, animation is key; people reviewing your work won''t spend enough time to discover your kickass gameplay, only enough to see the little guy blink from square to square. On the other hand, if what you really want is just to make a fun game with kickass gameplay, and you don''t want to spend too much time on the animation, go for it.

How appropriate. You fight like a cow.

Personally for me, its not that important. Blades of Exile was an incredibly good game and all the characters only had two frames of animation, walking and attacking. They also just teleported from square to square as well. The gameplay and imersiveness was enough though to make it not matter how many frames of animation they had, you can actually grow quite fond of its style.

"It''s a sad, sad day when your own weiner dog betrays you..."

The one misgiving I have with having entities blink between squares is it can lead to losing track of what''s moving where. If testing shows this not to be a problem, then there''s no need for more animation. Of course, all else being equal, added animation is only going to help the game be more attractive to play...

Animation is not all that important. Get your gameplay down and create a solid game. Then, add animation later on if it suits you. A good game design will be flexible enough to allow you to keep adding features as you like.

I think it's highly dependent on the style of your game. If you are talking Ultima 4 graphics then walking animation between cells is unncessary. If this is a game where you can be standing on more than one tile at a time (ie. you have free pixel-precise movement between tiles) then animation makes sense. What I find annoying is games that are strictly grid based but insist on showing an animation of the character walking between grids without allowing you to switch direction until the animation is done. ie. if I move down and decide I want to move up instead I have to wait for the character to move full into the tile below before having him go back up. No matter what you choose, please don't do that awful style of movement The player should be able to change the character's movement at any time.

Coming Soon - CustomBar

[edited by - LordElectro on September 7, 2003 10:22:52 PM]

That bad one is actually what I was planning. The reason I would do that is because the player actually moves to the new tile instantly. The animation would be shown after the player has moved to the tile. This is because the way the engine works each player needs his own tile and MUST be on a tile.
-Greg