Through Master of the Game, we sit down with Gameloft experts to explore the craft, decisions, and lessons behind building games enjoyed by millions of players around the world.
We spoke with David Shaw, Principal Technical Animator at Gameloft Brisbane, about building clean animation pipelines, the importance of standardization, and the behind-the-scenes work that helps every movement feel smooth and responsive.
Q1 — What's a decision in your field that seems small but can have a huge impact on the player experience?
The character's locomotion system and how we set up the blend style and timings can affect how a player feels. It is the one of the first things a player experiences and can adversely affect how it feels if we get it wrong.
Q2 — In your job, what's something that matters more than people expect?
Organization! from folder structures and naming conventions. This affects the assets, the names of the joints in the skeletons, rig control names. These things are defined early in the project and can make a significant difference in how tooling and code work with the assets.
Q3 — What's a challenge in your field that players rarely notice?
For the work of a technical animator to not be noticed when they are playing. It is very challenging to make a movement or combat system that is fluid and responsive to the player. If it does not feel right, they can tell immediately which greatly affects how they feel about the game.
Q4 — What's one lesson that completely changed the way you work?
To always build a character’s rig / skeleton the same way every time. Standardizing the structure and naming makes discussing with others much easier along with tool creation being easier to manage.
Finally, what are your 5 rules for a clean animation pipeline
- Use character rigging tools that are able to rebuild rigs at all times.
- Keep character rigs that are easy to use and consistent for animators.
- Use Exporting and Importing tools from the DCC applications to the game engine that are easy to use
- Keep naming conventions of characters and their animation assets consistent.
- Secondary animation systems can be enabled and disabled per animation.
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