It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

For a side-facing game like Elvetika or Penguin Pete, I'd draw the characters by hand and probably use Spriter to animate them. For a top-down game like Vargenstone, however, eyeballing it would make the proportions look funny, so I make quick, crappy 3D models and animate them, then draw over the models.

Which brings us to a principle called squash and stretch, or as Pixar calls it, squetch.

Basically, a soft body squashes and stretches as it moves:

Rocky the Dwarf isn't a very soft body, and at the frame rate I'm using, I don't need to worry about him squetching a lot.

But Buddah-Belly the Orc needs to be super squetchy, and his tumescent tummy needs to be even more squetchy than the rest of him. In addition, his ponderous paunch should exhibit secondary motion.  That is, it should lag behind his body.  In short, jiggle-physics.




When building these characters, I just slap a rig I've previously made on them (the rig is an armature you use to pose the character. Those circles sticking out of his face and stomach are handles to let me use the rig.)  It works terribly, but the players won't see the 3D model. Unless they come to this blog.

Since I need to manipulate his gargantuan gut independantly of the rest of him though, I had to add an additional belly-bone to the rig.

Accordingly, Our Hero wobbles while he works. It's not super-noticable, given the intentionally low frame-rate, but it adds a little, ahem, weight to his walk.