It’s been a few weeks since my last post on Braveless but I can assure you it totally worth the wait.

Since then, I’ve continued improving my animation skills. This time I want to show you my latest animation using a new technique.

I wanted to make a 3 hit combo attack for the two handed weapons of the game but I couldn’t find nice references for it. Thus, I opted to use a technique a friend told me about. This technique involves recording a video with the movements you want your animation to have, grab specific frames from the video, reduce them to your desired sprite size and then draw your character on top of your reference.

At first I thought it would be so tedious, and it actually is a little tedious recording the video. But once you have a good video, it really makes the animation process faster, since now you have the key poses ready as a reference.

Here’s the animation and the reference I recorded together so you can compare:

I guess this technique works great for me since I’m not an artist and it’s difficult for me to draw the key poses from scratch.

This is the animation implemented in the game:

Let me know what you think about the new animation.

Apart from animation I’ve also been experimenting with some fire FX while working on the magic system. The first magic spell is a fireball (of course) and I wanted the fire to act a little bit realistic. So I ended up playing with Unity’s particle system and I got a pretty decent fire explosion with flames scattering around and burning on the floor.

Here’s how it looks so far:

The flames on the floor can actually burn anything that goes through it, be it an enemy, a nearby flammable object or even you!

My wife has also been working hard on the UI design and she came up with a nice design a couple of weeks ago. Since then I’ve been implementing it in the game and it looks awesome.

Here’s a quick screenshot of how it looks:

You can check more about how it works in the gameplay video at the end of this post. You will also see the Level Up system and the Attributes system in action being able to upgrade your stats after leveling up.

And speaking of leveling up, in Braveless you can rest and level up by going to the restroom, because there’s no better way to relax after long hours of fighting right?

Lastly, we also have a cooking UI, so now I can proudly show the system to you without feeling embarrassed about the previous UI I had but this one’s better if you check it on action on the gameplay video.

Anyways, here’s gameplay video as promised, please give us some feedback letting us know what you think:

One last thing, we may have a public quick demo for the end of this month, so stay tuned or follow us on Facebook to know more about this.

Thanks for reading, ’til next time.