Timing for Animation, 40th Anniversary Edition, 3rd Edition

Animating for Interactive Games

To create the play actions in the body of a game, the animator is told the types of actions needed for each individual character. They play the latest “build” of the game. The same as a storyreel. The animator works with the programmer to build a library of base actions for the characters, sometimes called a “dance card” or “play-run”—fast run, slow run, starts and stops, hard kick, soft kick, base pose, and action pose, etc. Trying to allow for every possible action a game might want a character to do. Maybe as many as 50 different actions to go in and out of the base pose. The actions must be done in such a way that the programmer, or coder, can cut and splice two or more actions together to assemble the storyline ...