Right now we are working on a quick clicker game for mobile platforms.
When we started this project we wanted to do things fast, although it still takes more time than I expect due to icons, gui, and that stuff... god how I hate that stuff.
The thing is, I managed to get really fluid half 3D-ish effect animations by keeping my art as simple as possible color-wise and trying to get as little quads as possible to get the desired effect so it works really good at most mobile devices.
Here are a couple of examples of real in-game animations:
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This is the maximum level of movement the head allows without breaking up. Notice it starts to look weird because the ears dont move. In order for the ears to move I would need another bone that tilt the ears in the oposite direction to create an even more 3D-y effect, this would make animation much more complex and i would need some more quads to move ONLY the ears, so since animations with the head tilting are somewhat subtle we decided not to do that:
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Finally for those who want to know the quads used and the skinning method, here it is (the bone hat moves that is just above the nose):
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It's really simple, it creates a nice subtle 3D effect (specially if you consider the ear thing) and it uses up very little amounts of quads. The hair also has a similar pattern, it is like that because it will change along with the progression of the game.
What do you guys think?
