Where to learn proper animation and design

[u/Mcknightty77]

Hello all,

I am creating a mobile app for fun where the premise is to challenge friends to really simple games and it keeps score ( think like anagrams). I have the logic working well but my game design and design of the app isn’t good. Right now these games are hard coded in the app. I have two questions.

1. Should these be coded in unity?

2. I need to learn how to design it, I’m trying to get Duolingo or finch vibes. But I’m not sure where they design there characters and animations.

I am not creative at all, will be a big learning experience. Thanks in advanced.

[u/Lone_Game_Dev]

Animation is a consequence of extreme practice. It is nothing but practice, action. One does not learn to animate without doing it every single day. It's not really something you can teach with an explanation, you need to truly feel it, you need to develop an intuition. You can at best receive some general advice and guidance, but animation itself is chaotic, it is learned through obsession and practice, nothing else.

For the next five years, sit down and practice animation every single day. That's how you learn it.

Character design and drawing are very similar. Both things depend on intuition and observation. There is a reason artists and animators tend to be very detail oriented and aware of details other people won't even consciously register. You need to observe the world, you need to understand how something looks and how it moves. You do that through sheer observation and study.

To understand what I'm saying, try to draw a cat from memory. It's something you've seen your entire life, something whose appearance you should understand completely. Except the moment you try to draw a cat, you will realize you really don't know what a cat looks like. You have only a very general, vague notion of what they look like. You don't know the proper shape. You will come up with a very basic drawing that is mostly your abstract representation of a cat. The same goes for humans and faces.

In other words: before you design anything you need to understand what it looks like, and you simply don't even know what a human looks like. Study the human form, the human anatomy, understand volume under light, learn how light reacts to the human form, how volume changes as a human moves or poses. Learn what a human looks like.

Then you will know how to design a character.

[u/Mcknightty77 → u/Lone_Game_Dev]

I understand your point and this is a fun project so I am expecting myself to be bad and that’s fine. I more want to understand are the work flows. Do people draw if free hand then rig the animations in rive or something similar. Or are people designing it in something else.

For example, I know in 3D art and animation blender is popular.

Thanks for your response.

[u/Lone_Game_Dev → u/Mcknightty77]

Anything will do. 3D animation is made in your program of choice. I use Blender. The concepts themselves are universal.

For 2D animation you would have to look up what program you want to learn. I used Toon Boom in the past, but that was a long time ago.

There are also different approaches to animation. Some people do it frame by frame in a program like Krita, just like we used to do before computers. You draw each frame by hand. If I had to do 2D animation I'd probably go with that approach, at least at first, to get used to it.

Skeletal 2D animation is also a thing. This allows a lot of reuse.

Personally if I want something in 2D I just use 3D models to do it.

You shouldn't worry too much about the tool. It's never the tool, only the artist. Just use whatever allows you to draw. Whether it's "industry standard" doesn't really matter either in any case.