This devlog focuses on monster animations in Aethermancer! It consists of the written devlog by one of our Pixel Artist Adam as well as a video about specific monster animation at the end.
"Just for some background on my involvement with moi rai, I worked on Monster Sanctuary towards the end of its development creating monsters 51 through 111, then later remastering some of the earlier monsters. I worked on MS as a freelancer and since a style was already established, my main goal was just to match the style and tone already in the game. After a grueling year of drawing loveable pixel art monsters, Monster Sanctuary was released. I looked at our main developer Sersch and he looked at me. I gave him the Pixel Artists Salute and rode off into the sunset. Wacom tablet in hand, never to be seen again. Then I came back! My dramatic reappearance to the moi rai team came pretty much right at the start of their new project, Aethermancer. Unlike Monster Sanctuary, Aethermancers art style was still undecided and moldable, so I wanted to take that opportunity to push the art direction into a position that would be best suited for our team's strengths. Most of my professional work has been drawing characters looking cool while punching, looking cool while shooting, looking cool while slashing, and just looking cool while doing all sorts of destructive things. Its really one of the only things I know how to do. So when designing the visual structure of our new game, all I could think about was will the monsters look cool drawn like this? This goal affected a lot of the artistic decisions within the game. For example, the choice to cut away to a battle screen instead of fighting in the overworld was made in part because we knew we could make more detailed sprites and animations if we went with a side view perspective, as that would only require animating the sprite from one view. While I love the idea of battling in the overworld like Chrono Trigger, what I dont love is animating a giant toad with a pipe doing a body slam facing down, then a body slam facing right, then facing up, then facing up and to the right you get the point. With the current design, each monster has one detailed battle sprite and we can take a lot of time and effort to make the actions super fluid and unique." Some initial concepts for a more complex Naga overworld sprite, and also a monster in an isometric-style that will probably never reappear ever again ever:
"Another concept I had in mind is something that I call 'animation space'. I loved working on Monster Sanctuary, but one issue I kept running into while animating is that I had no space! Each monster had to stand still (well, hop forward), pretend to swing at the air or do a little dance, then jump back into place. There are only so many ways that you can animate an attack like this, and I think I animated all of them. Apparently monsters in Monster Sanctuary use the Shouting technique quite often..."
"That aint the case with Aethermancer folks. We tried it out at the beginning and said 'Nah, this is GARBAGE!'"
"The monsters in Aethermancer have the whole canvas to move around in. Some monsters jump to their enemies and slice em up (Naga), other monsters dash straight towards them and punch em in the face (Gargoyle), some go underground, pop back up and then whack the opponent (Mandragora). This style gives us a ton of space for unique and creative animations. You want a monster that teleports behind the enemy like Goku and blasts him with a Kamehameha? We can do that. A monster that jumps so high that he goes off the screen then comes down smashing the enemy with an aerial strike? We can do that too! A monster that punches so hard that he causes the enemies to fly through the background, opening up a NEW SECRET BACKGROUND!?! Well actually no, we cant do that. Thats too much work. This is probably my favorite part about working on Aethermancer, there are just so many opportunities for creativity in the battle animations and I think it makes the monsters stand out from other games and feel unique."
"We as a team are quite proud of the new style of monsters in Aethermancer, and its always exciting to come up with new ideas and share them with all of you! Were looking forward to creating a cast of loveable (or in some cases, weird and creepy) new monsters that you can smash your opponents into oblivion with in all sorts of new and interesting ways!" Hope you guys enjoyed reading about our monster animations. If you want to get more insight into monster pixel art animations, you can also check out this video Adam made where he goes deeper into thought processes when animating pixel art monsters: [previewyoutube=vckQK94-PMU;full][/previewyoutube]

Stay tuned for the next dev log and feel free to leave comments!