Preparing Cutout Animations for Godot 4

This game was inspired by the title page picture that I did for Inktober. I started cutting out the robot for 2D animation and was questioning how animatable it might be with only one leg that has a knee type pivot.

An important part of the cutout animation process is how your parts layer over each other. I did this somewhat hastily and am not totally happy with the leg sockets. The black circles are bigger than they need to be and would be more polished looking if they included some highlighting like in the left shoulder.

To test this I made a simple animation. This exercise confirmed my concern that the robot would be difficult to animate as designed: getting convincing animation will be more complicated and the robot will take more screen space than I anticipated. A good concept drawing does not necessarily make a good character.

A simple test animation exploring how I might make a strangely designed robot walk

A wheel would be easier to animate so I tried this. I wanted to have some obstacles for the robot and had not decided what they might be. Making a decision on the wheel answered that: there could be spikes and rocks in the environment to puncture the tire. More important than being easy to animate, I believe the wheel will make the game more fun because the jerky walking motion might be distracting in an action/arcade style game.

A note on FlipaClip: it’s a fun and efficient 2D animation tool. The ads are pretty annoying so it’s a good motivator to pay for it but it only has a subscription model. It’s not expensive but I hate signing up for recurring costs, particularly when I may not use it for months. It does export a series of PNG images so I will play with it some more.