I’ve recently discovered that there’s a new adventure game project in the works called Whateverland by Caligari Games, it has a really bizarre feel and atmosphere, and I especially dig that it’s going to have a multipath walkthrough. I really hope they succeed with the Kickstarter campaign!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/caligari/whateverland-a-grotesque-burton-style-adventure
Looks interesting. Not as cute as most of recent adventure games. There’s one thing I don’t like and it’s very common. It’s something about movement / animation. So many of these games have smooth animation that looks like something interpolated between a few frames. I think it started with flash games and now it’s almost everywhere.
It features a ghost, a circusTM and traffic conesTM…
I agree.
For me “Flash-like animation” is not really something I see as visually pleasing too.
Like on Mêl… no wait, of course you mean Thimbleweed Park! (There were no traffic cones in the “real” game though, right?)
You mean the unrealistic “breathing” animation, that continues during speech, giving the effect that the character is breathing in while simultaneously talking? Yeah, don’t like that either.
[EDIT] Also, seems more like a puzzle game than a P&C Adventure game. Seems like it wants to do everything: puzzles, minigames (lots of minigames!), even a complete Magic The Gathering clone from what I understand (Bell & Bones). Seems like they want to do everything, and I’m afraid it’s going to turn out to be some forgettable mish-mash of ideas without focus or vision.
This “squeezing” animation is something which was used a lot in the Flash-era and which I’m not a fan of.
Otherwise the art-style definitely doesn’t look bad though.
Nah, that’s not it. I’m not an expert but I think it’s due to the fact that traditional animation has a limited amount of frames (I think 12 was a standard for a long time) and it wasn’t automatically interpolated between two keyframes. This looks very fluid, it’s probably 30 frames and it has that digital, smooth movement. It started with Flash and I think all animations done with software like After Effects using puppet tool have this kind of quality to them. It was cool when it was new, but now I dislike it.
Nothing beats hand-drawn in-betweening.
Flash is just…
Not really a standard, but it was just faster (and cheaper) to animate by twos, while the result wasn’t that less fluid.
That decision - together with 24 fps film- is simply ingrained in our collective visual memory as being pleasing to watch.
(The same reason I think movies in 60fps super HD look “cheap” or break the suspense of disbelief)
That looks “cheap” because it was often used in soap operas and telenovelas, and I guess by now most TV shows are filmed digitally. Where cinema used 24FPS and film, digital cameras with higher framerates were being used for TV when they became available. I guess a full digital workflow is a lot cheaper than using film reel.
Legolas jumping around in The Hobbit looks cheap because it looks cheap. Not because it’s 60 fps. 