So, how did I actually make Jaeger?

I’d seen professional animators separate their work into passes, where they rough out the initial idea quickly, then repeatedly refine it until it looked right, and I thought to myself “well if that works for them then I suppose I ought to try it as well”, and separated out my work into four stages:

1. sketch – create the lowest effort version of the animations possible. Represent every animation in some capacity so I have a good idea of what the character actually is and can do.

2. block – take the key poses from the sketch and translate them as best as possible into final art. This stage is when the crazy sketches I’d made met the harsh reality of semi-static symbols. There are still layering issues, clipping, the eye is completely static, etc, but I kicked those down to the “refine” stage and ignored them.

3. tween – actually put in the tweens. And add lots of easing in/out to cheat and use less keyframes. It was about here I discovered you can’t just arbitrarily rotate/scale things without consequences, and so I had to fix that.

4. refine – Actually fix all the issues I’d been building up with the previous steps. Also, condense each animation into its own individual symbol, which I can then apply full-body squash/stretch & shearing to without having to mess with the underlying keyframes. One… quirk… of flash is that if you have a symbol with animation, unless you specifically step into that symbol in isolation, you don’t actually get to see the animation in it. Which meant that wrapping an animation into a symbol was effectively a 1-way transition. I could pull the animation back out and make edits to it, but that would be a LOT of work, so I had to be basically completely sure the animation was good before doing that. This is also where a lot of programmatic things finally were added, like the eye open / close, and eye/head tracking (if you pet Jaeger and then walk around you’ll see what I mean), which I’ll give its own post later down the line.

(secret 5th one because I didn’t consider this when I began: camera & audio) – I took a look at my nonexistent audio engineering skills and instead bothered Al for his stock of audio files. And lemme tell ya, I am so glad he was willing to help because not having to make that audio from scratch saved me at the very least 2 weeks of work, probably more. Then came the camera work. I am incredibly glad that flash cs5.5 has motion tweens, as those were the ez lazy way to get smooth arcing camera movements. I’ll go into more detail on that in a different post.

And that’s it! There’s a ton of things I still wanted to fix/add but if I didn’t wrap Jaeger up and move on I’d never have released anything.

If you happen to be interested, I took snapshots of Jaeger at every major milestone (NOTE: late into developing Jaeger flash crashed so hard it broke a bunch of my shape tweens. I fixed them in the final thing but didn’t go back and fix them in the milestone files. So some of the tweens in these will just be busted. You’ll have to just believe me that at one point they were working.): https://www.dropbox.com/s/nbrek98uc.....cenes.zip?dl=0