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Breathing life into the beasts
Over the past few weeks we’ve been working with an exotic talent from New Jersey, USA (that’s pretty exotic for us Londoners) who’s been breathing life into the beasts. Kyle McKernan is a fantastic animator, and we thought it’s time to show you some of his amazing work.
Meet Eagleg! This is the animation that plays as it appears in your world.
The game looks so different with each beast animating like this. It’s come alive. But another quality is that the animations help players understand the effects on the world of the Artefacts they play. This is super important in tying together the on-screen game to what you’re doing with the tower in the real world.
Meet fabulous Shark. All beasts can evolve into special fabulous versions of themselves.
A big challenge for Kyle was making the animations short and punchy, because they have to be readable as the player glances at the screen. But within that glance we want players to develop a care about the beasts. Kyle’s given them a cartoonish expressiveness, which is especially clear in the animations that play when the beasts are endangered.
Meet Toucan, flappin’ happy.
Kyle’s been doing a lot more animation besides, which we’ll show off in the future. Little UI flourishes, other characters, instructive sequences… He’s been pretty busy. We thought we’d make a little video all about it.
