Hey everyone, Ben Halstead here, the Lead Animator for Beast's Fury. I'd like to address your questions regarding our animation. (this is a long post - sorry!)
Regarding Vincent's animation retiming, our situation is this: We originally animated him at 24 frames per second. This is because most of my prior 2D animation experience was cinematic-style animation, and 24 fps is a common standard for such animation in the US. The frame data for all of our characters assumes a 60 fps functional frame rate. So, we later realized that it would be more convenient to animate at 30 fps, and then double the exposures for the animation in order to play it at 60 fps at perfect accuracy, rather than trying to force a 24 fps animation into 60 fps, which as some of you have noted, involves extending some exposures more than others. In addition, since the frame data assumes 60 fps, there are times when a move might have (for example) 3 startup frames at 60 fps. So, some further tweaking is required to match the animation (which has an even number of frames per exposure/hold because it was doubled from 30 fps) to the occasional odd-numbered frame number in the frame data. All of this is not that big of a deal for a 30 fps sprite animation, but it's a bit more of a hassle for Vincent, because 1) we're forcing his 24 fps animation to play at 60 fps, 2) we're figuring out where it would be better to round down rather than up with his exposures in order to match odd-numbered frame data, and 3) to top it all off, some of his earliest animation was made even before the IndieGoGo, and in fact even before we had ANY frame data at all or had the slightest clue of what we were doing, so we actually have to go back and add new frames of animation to some of his moves, or subtract old ones, to make it match the frame data.
Having said that, I want to clarify that all of this retiming for Vincent (which is currently almost done) has actually been happening pretty recently. I'll try to describe what happened to the IndieGoGo funds from the animation team's perspective. First of all, as we've mentioned, we severely underestimated our costs. Of the 21 grand we received, the animation team received a certain fraction of that, and that was doled out to (first of all) cover the costs of animating the roughs for Vincent and Don. As we worked, new moves were slowly added to the roster until the workload had nearly doubled, which also added to expenses. Then, when the roughs were finished, we set the team to work on inking, and soon learned firsthand why projects tend to contract out their cleanup animation. This process turned out to be the most lengthy and expensive part of our pipeline by a wide margin, and our remaining funds were spent on the first half of Vincent's inks. While a few dedicated artists cranked out those inks and a chunk of the inks for Don, my fiancee and I personally inked the last third to half of Vincent's animations without little or no additional pay, and recently finished. This is because I made a promise to my team and to all of our fans to finish this work for the budget we initially declared in the IndieGoGo, and I personally intend to continue until the demo is either completed or cancelled. That said, Ryhan has continued to support our team out of his own pocket whenever possible, to help us through the past few months, and a successful Kickstarter would allow me to work full time and hire a team again.
Regarding Don's fancy finisher animation: The animator who did that, as well as the entirety of Don's rough animation, is an old friend and colleague of mine. Knowing what he's capable of, I wanted to give him some creative freedom with the cinematic finisher. I admit that what he gave us was above and beyond our expectations, but not to the extent that we don't plan to use it in the game, and since his payment was agreed upon in advance, we paid no extra cost for the quality of that cinematic. We're all very proud of his work and plan to bring him back for more if this funding is successful. Although, he didn't design Don; to those who are wondering about the character designs, all of our characters so far were designed by the same Character Designer.
Many have noticed that Vincent's idle stance, and perhaps a couple of his other animations could use some work. I agree, because these were the very first animations made for this project, and we've come a long way since then (I first started on this about a year and a half ago, well before the previous IndieGoGo campaign). But while we would love to go back and rework these, we do have higher priorities for the immediate future, such as completing the rest of Vincent and Don. But rest assured they are targeted on our radar.
Regarding why we would animate at 30 fps: To clarify, we are not animating everything on 1's at 30 fps, or on 2's at 60 fps (as much as I wish we were all superhuman). We are generally animating on 2's, 3's, and 4's at 30 fps (it varies based on what looks good - the animators have some room for creative expression within the frame data), and then as I said above, multiplying the exposures x 2 to bring it in line with the 60 fps frame data. In fact, the number of frames in our animation has been around 1,000 - 1,300 per character so far, which is in line with many big-name fighters, and slightly less than Skullgirls.
In a nutshell, our work since the IndieGoGo has been a learning process for all of us on the Beast's Fury team, but as a result we are much more educated and organized with our project. At least regarding the animation team, the pricing we are asking for in the Kickstarter is based directly on the measured performances and costs of our team members as they worked on Vincent and Don. I will not go into too many specifics since our employment details are confidential. But the inking is the most difficult / expensive part, followed by the roughs, and then the flat colors, shading, and highlights are all somewhat quick to do by comparison, thanks to the digital software we're using. I don't really know how to break it down any further than that.
We remain a passionate and devoted team and I hope you will consider supporting us. Please let me know if you have any more questions. Thanks!
