Fantasy Punch Up Dungeon Crawler - Commissioned

I was commissioned to work on a client's game that was to mix a roguelike dungeon crawler with the arcade game 'Punch Up'. I loved the concept, so I had to jump aboard. The interesting challenge with this project was providing great detail, smooth animations with clear, readable attacks and responses. The key I found to achieving this was to animate from the perspective of the gameplay, using the player character as an anchor point for the animations. This allowed me to keep in mind how long an attack needed to be and the width of the hitboxes. Since the player can dodge left, right, and duck. I needed to keep in mind how my artwork could support the readability of these directions.

The 'Kobold' was to have 7 attacks. When a character's weapon is a spear, and you're tasked with giving readable and unique wind-ups for each attack, I found the key was to focus on making sure the point of the weapon was angled differently for each wind-up, and using the head of the character to indicate differences in attacks. The result of this meant that each windup could be read, and the player was able to become familiar with attack patterns.