Astral Onslaught! Virgo - Concept, Animation

Virgo - I wanted to try and represent that feeling of "celestial formality" for Astral Onslaught.
I knew with our team, the majority of characters were going to be feminine or young, so I went with a handsome dude. I don't regret it

Weapon concept #1 (Lily): since Virgo represents the goddess of harvest, I thought it would be interesting to link his to some flowers (literally reaping with what he sows). I thought flowers would help balance out femininity and masculinity as well.

Weapon concept #2 (chrysanthemum) - Personally I really like this one, but would've been a little annoying to animate

Weapon concept #3 (bird of paradise) - this is the one me and management went with. The duality helped decide Virgo's play kit, with one scythe regenerating health and one scythe dealing more damage.

Virgo Hairstyles: A (rather limited) sheet of hairs and accessories, though it was decided that animations were priority: majority vote went with the first hairstyle, with runner ups being 2 and 7

Color scheme #1
Before I knew how to effectively and efficiently recolor, I had to individually color each part of clothing each variation (or use color correction layers that affected the entire canvas/image). Thank goodness I learned a faster way now...

Color scheme #2

Color scheme #3

Color scheme #4
We ended up going with these colors! But the design had to be simplified for the ease of 2D frame by frame animation. I learned this the hard way through Virgo's idle sprites...

Idle (draft 1):
Many errors and very stiff movement. My art producer and I had to spend a long time on syncsketch deciding what details to remove and change (notably, hair detail, posture, face and color changes)

Idle (draft 2):
Collar and coat simplified for easier animation. Eyes are narrower as well
Movement was still stiff.
(I was not animating with proper animation software - I was drawing frames individually and compiling them in a gif-maker...)

Idle (draft 3):
Smoother movement, at this point it was decided that the boots' details did not have to exist for convenience of animating

Final Idle animation
Idle took longer than other animations because we were still deciding on how our chibified versions of our characters would look like in this time

Attack (draft 1)
I did not look at a reference (which was my first mistake.) It is just very wonky and hard to look at in hindsight now that I know better, but it's good that the art production team was very patient with me. I learned so much from them

Attack (draft 2)
less movement of the feet and legs, but overall still rigid. (It's also very obvious that I tried to keep it in frame, and it made it look unnatural in the process)

Final Attack animation
I learned extending the canvas helps to visualize natural movements. It also helps programmers to keep sprites centered and look like they're in the position their hit-boxes are

Special attack (draft)
This attack has Virgo combining the two scythes into one - you can see that I reused the chrysanthemum scythe here. At this point, we were in time-crunch by week 6 of the second quarter, so we had to get things done fast!

Final Special attack animation

Run (draft 1):
This was just terrible. Don't be like me where I don't look at references and keep the canvas small, it restricts the movement so badly it makes me cry looking at this again

Run (draft 2):
Bigger canvas and reference used this time, the improvement was so huge it was recommended to another astral artist for running animation help

Final run animation

Heavy attack (draft):
A previous version of this animation had more frames to it. More frames is also a problem as animations tend to look slower with more frames (and Astral is a very fast paced fighting game), but it was good to know for the future!

Final Heavy attack

Hurt (final)

Final Mix up animation
This one had no draft. It was major crunch at this point so we went ahead and finalized the animations that we had.

Unused block animation
Initially I believed every character had a block function (like in Smash Bros), but it turns out only a certain few did for their unique/special moves, as determined by management and design

Final jump animation
This one had no draft as well. I was one of the few who had finished all of their animations in time, so I was tasked to help others with finishing their animations. Thankfully, we had enough time to do that too... It was a lot

Idle - Sprite sheet

Running - Sprite sheet

Attack - Sprite sheet

Heavy attack - Sprite sheet

Mix up - Sprite sheet

Block (unused) - Sprite sheet

Special attack - Sprite sheet

Jump - Sprite sheet

(These upcoming sprite frames are just to show how the gif and sprite compiler I use is getting rid of some of the sfx - just trust me when I say it looks better in the game..)

This was the draw pile for our Z3 2023 Showcase in UCI! Our artists and non-artists came together to make a poster filled with fun references and inside-jokes. I am responsible for the green and magenta abomination at the left bottom corner

I was not assigned to do a part of Astral Onslaught's cover image, but I just wanted to showcase it because it's so cool! Credits to the polish/splash artists in our group (most are linked in the Itch.io page)!