New animations: Player idle #7

Do you know that moment in a game when you are idle for 10 seconds or so and the character that you control starts doing something?

Some games prefer to have a single idle state (like the Yogi Bear game above), others cycle to many idle animations (like Wayne's World and many others).

I fell in love with the possibility of having multiple idle states so I finally went with the following - names are self-explanatory:

  • idle (breathing)

  • draw_guns

  • play_with_boomerang

  • play_with_bomb

  • thumbs_upwave

I can decide when to throw one animation or another in order to make sense of them and not bore the player with repetitive visuals.

I can also chain animations and make a single one (like play_with_both_boomerang_and_bomb).


If you don't have budget restrains, I think this is a great addition to the game's aesthetics.

There are a few catches:

  • animations like these can be used in fewer contexts

  • if your character walks on 4 or 6 axis then you need an animation for each of the positions - that's expensive and tedious

  • it can add to the complexity of your state decision making. When do you throw an idle animation? Which one?


Here is the full video gamedev log:

Until the next time! Cheers!