WEBVTT 00:00:00.880 --> 00:00:03.340 Hello, and welcome to New Frame Plus, 00:00:03.340 --> 00:00:05.560 a series about video game animation. 00:00:05.620 --> 00:00:08.360 By overwhelming demand, you folks have voted 00:00:08.360 --> 00:00:11.440 for the next Smash Bros character we talk about to be... 00:00:11.440 --> 00:00:12.920 Mr Game & Watch. 00:00:12.920 --> 00:00:14.080 And I can see why! 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:15.100 He’s weird. 00:00:15.100 --> 00:00:16.460 Look at him. He's flat. 00:00:16.600 --> 00:00:18.580 He’s basically just a silhouette. 00:00:18.580 --> 00:00:21.540 His moves all have like three frames of animation... 00:00:21.920 --> 00:00:23.140 No one else is like this. 00:00:23.140 --> 00:00:27.420 How does this even WORK in a game like Smash, where pretty much every other character is 00:00:27.420 --> 00:00:31.840 fully 3D and operating at a silky smooth 60 frames per second? 00:00:32.380 --> 00:00:34.320 Let’s get into it, shall we? 00:00:38.400 --> 00:00:42.540 Mr Game & Watch isn’t so much a character as an amalgamation. 00:00:42.540 --> 00:00:46.340 A stand-in representing a whole series of games from the 80s. 00:00:46.340 --> 00:00:49.980 Yes, before there was GameBoy, even before there was NES… 00:00:49.980 --> 00:00:51.780 there was Game & Watch. 00:00:51.780 --> 00:00:55.820 Game & Watch was this whole line of of handheld games that Nintendo produced 00:00:55.820 --> 00:00:58.400 between 1980 and 1991. 00:00:58.400 --> 00:01:02.700 Each one of these devices usually contained a single, very simple game 00:01:02.700 --> 00:01:04.800 played on a liquid crystal display, 00:01:04.800 --> 00:01:08.160 similar to that old CASIO watch you used to wear in middle school 00:01:08.160 --> 00:01:09.760 (you... Cool Person). 00:01:09.760 --> 00:01:11.660 But here’s the thing about LCDs: 00:01:11.660 --> 00:01:14.860 you can’t really move the crystals in those displays around. 00:01:15.020 --> 00:01:17.340 They can only be turned ON or OFF. 00:01:17.340 --> 00:01:19.760 And that makes it pretty hard to animate… 00:01:19.760 --> 00:01:20.900 ...uh, anything. 00:01:21.000 --> 00:01:25.780 But! Say you were to place those crystals in several different locations on the screen, 00:01:25.780 --> 00:01:30.360 and then had them switch ON or OFF in response to the player’s button presses… 00:01:30.360 --> 00:01:33.560 if you did that, it would almost SORT OF create the impression 00:01:33.560 --> 00:01:36.580 of a character or object moving across the screen! 00:01:36.760 --> 00:01:40.820 THIS is the origin for Mr Game & Watch’s weird movement style. 00:01:40.820 --> 00:01:44.420 And they way it’s been implemented in Smash is actually pretty clever! 00:01:44.600 --> 00:01:47.960 So in animation, we have this thing called “Key Poses” 00:01:47.960 --> 00:01:52.540 (also sometimes referred to as “Extremes”, that's the more traditional animation term, 00:01:52.540 --> 00:01:54.500 but in many cases they’re kind of interchangeable). 00:01:54.560 --> 00:01:58.360 Anyway, Key Poses are the critical poses in an animation 00:01:58.360 --> 00:02:01.820 which most clearly communicate the “story” of the action. 00:02:01.820 --> 00:02:05.600 They’re the extreme points which define the path of motion. 00:02:05.600 --> 00:02:08.440 Remember in that previous episode about Link’s attacks 00:02:08.440 --> 00:02:12.360 where I highlighted these Windup, Attack and Follow-Through poses? 00:02:12.360 --> 00:02:17.380 I would call all of these Key Poses (or Extremes) for Link’s basic attack. 00:02:17.380 --> 00:02:22.520 Even without all the frames in between, these frames tell the story of what’s happening. 00:02:22.520 --> 00:02:26.260 If you look at old school 8- or 16-bit sprite animation, 00:02:26.260 --> 00:02:30.800 those game characters operated almost exclusively through key poses. 00:02:31.100 --> 00:02:32.540 From Mario’s jump... 00:02:33.040 --> 00:02:34.600 ...to Simon’s whip... 00:02:35.220 --> 00:02:36.640 ...to Mega Man’s run, 00:02:36.640 --> 00:02:40.980 all of these animations are built using just a handful of key poses, 00:02:40.980 --> 00:02:45.160 the fewest poses possible to adequately portray the action. 00:02:45.160 --> 00:02:50.280 If you look at Mr. Game & Watch in Smash, you’ll see that he also operates on Key Poses... 00:02:50.580 --> 00:02:51.800 ...kind of. 00:02:51.800 --> 00:02:57.220 All his moves and attacks are, of course, derived from his whole library of handheld games, 00:02:57.220 --> 00:03:00.100 but when you look at the character movement in those old games, 00:03:00.100 --> 00:03:02.640 because of that old display technology, 00:03:02.640 --> 00:03:05.280 there’s something... disjointed about it. 00:03:05.280 --> 00:03:10.640 There are so few poses available and the characters cover so much distance at a time... 00:03:10.640 --> 00:03:15.360 there's very little connective tissue between each new pose and position on screen, 00:03:15.360 --> 00:03:19.600 so those characters tend to feel a little erratic in their movement as a result, 00:03:19.600 --> 00:03:23.120 and none of their actions feel like they have any force behind them. 00:03:23.260 --> 00:03:26.140 This presents an interesting problem for Smash: 00:03:26.140 --> 00:03:31.500 how do you replicate that weird, choppy, slightly-disorienting quality of movement? 00:03:35.020 --> 00:03:40.580 The first thing the animators have done here is use as few frames of animation as possible. 00:03:40.580 --> 00:03:46.600 Mr. Game & Watch’s attacks are all constructed using maybe three poses, sometimes just two! 00:03:46.680 --> 00:03:52.580 All his moves are built on key poses, just like those 8- and 16-bit characters I described before, 00:03:52.580 --> 00:03:56.760 but it doesn’t feel like there are quite ENOUGH key poses in there to completely 00:03:56.760 --> 00:03:59.620 sell the physicality of the actions he’s performing. 00:03:59.620 --> 00:04:04.120 Old Game & Watch titles just could not take advantage of most of the animation principles 00:04:04.120 --> 00:04:06.500 that we'd use to convey force or impact, 00:04:06.500 --> 00:04:10.120 and Smash’s animators have actually preserved some of that effect 00:04:10.120 --> 00:04:12.980 in not only the posing of Mr. Game & Watch’s moves, 00:04:12.980 --> 00:04:16.440 but also the very even, flat timing of them! 00:04:16.740 --> 00:04:19.460 You won’t see him actually SWING a chair. 00:04:19.460 --> 00:04:21.260 He just holds the chair this way... 00:04:21.260 --> 00:04:22.900 ...and then he holds it THAT way. 00:04:22.900 --> 00:04:26.100 And, for Mr. Game & Watch, that constitutes an attack. 00:04:26.140 --> 00:04:31.919 This is a character that REALLY relies on Smash’s dust clouds and hit pauses and 00:04:31.920 --> 00:04:35.280 effects explosions to get any sense of impact to his moves. 00:04:35.280 --> 00:04:38.760 For any other character, that would be an animation problem. 00:04:38.760 --> 00:04:42.040 But for Mr. Game & Watch, it is exactly that problem 00:04:42.040 --> 00:04:45.540 that makes his moveset feel faithful to the source material. 00:04:45.940 --> 00:04:50.639 But one of my favorite things about Mr. Game & Watch’s animation - and it’s the thing that I think 00:04:50.639 --> 00:04:55.050 really makes this whole animation aesthetic work - is the way the animators have managed to 00:04:55.050 --> 00:04:59.540 recreate the erratic, disorienting quality of his movement. 00:04:59.540 --> 00:05:01.700 You can REALLY see this in his run. 00:05:01.700 --> 00:05:05.039 Just for comparison, let’s look at Mega Man’s old run again... 00:05:05.040 --> 00:05:09.920 It’s built from just three poses, but you can see how each one of those Key Poses 00:05:09.920 --> 00:05:11.720 leads from one to the next. 00:05:11.720 --> 00:05:13.940 Step-and-step-and-step-and-step... 00:05:13.940 --> 00:05:16.320 You can see him putting one foot in front of the other, 00:05:16.320 --> 00:05:20.080 you can see the nice up-and-down bob on his body with each stride... 00:05:20.140 --> 00:05:23.860 Just three poses, but still enough to clearly communicate a run. 00:05:23.860 --> 00:05:26.900 But with Mr. Game & Watch, and I LOVE this, 00:05:26.900 --> 00:05:30.920 these poses barely communicate the action of running AT ALL. 00:05:30.920 --> 00:05:34.300 NONE of these poses connect to each other in a logical way. 00:05:34.300 --> 00:05:37.860 It’s like they took a bunch of individual run cycle poses, 00:05:37.860 --> 00:05:41.200 and then they completely randomized what order they play in 00:05:41.200 --> 00:05:45.460 so you’re left with an erratic jumble of poses that make no sense together. 00:05:45.880 --> 00:05:47.620 That is really clever! 00:05:47.620 --> 00:05:51.380 It’s not exactly how characters moved in the old Game & Watch days, 00:05:51.380 --> 00:05:54.960 but it does sell the FEELING of how they moved in those games. 00:05:54.960 --> 00:05:59.180 This brings us to the next question: how has Mr. Game & Watch’s animation 00:05:59.180 --> 00:06:01.100 been adapted to work in Smash? 00:06:01.100 --> 00:06:05.740 Well, there is one VERY BIG change, and you’ve probably already picked up on it. 00:06:05.740 --> 00:06:08.820 In those old Game & Watch titles, like I mentioned before, 00:06:08.820 --> 00:06:12.040 the crystals in those old LCD displays couldn't move. 00:06:12.040 --> 00:06:15.020 So the characters couldn’t really “move” either. 00:06:15.020 --> 00:06:19.260 They could only disappear and reappear in a new position simultaneously. 00:06:19.260 --> 00:06:23.040 But that is not how Mr. Game & Watch moves in Smash. At all. 00:06:23.040 --> 00:06:27.400 Sure, there might be a nice, stuttery pop to the way he switches between poses, 00:06:27.400 --> 00:06:29.480 but his movement around the battlefield? 00:06:29.480 --> 00:06:33.139 The tracking of his POSITION... is silky smooth. 00:06:33.140 --> 00:06:38.500 See, limiting the visual information that Mr. Game & Watch’s posing conveys is one thing, 00:06:38.500 --> 00:06:39.940 you can get away with that. 00:06:39.940 --> 00:06:42.780 But his position on screen at any given moment? 00:06:42.780 --> 00:06:43.740 No no. 00:06:43.740 --> 00:06:47.100 Positional data is CRUCIAL to Smash Bros gameplay. 00:06:47.100 --> 00:06:52.040 If Mr. Game & Watch popped around the screen in Smash the same way he did in his handheld games, 00:06:52.040 --> 00:06:55.200 effectively teleporting around the stage nonstop, 00:06:55.200 --> 00:06:57.360 he would be a nightmare to fight. 00:06:57.380 --> 00:06:59.260 And to CONTROL, for that matter. 00:06:59.260 --> 00:07:02.520 So, even though it defies the character’s source material, 00:07:02.520 --> 00:07:05.940 for the sake of gameplay, Smash’s animators made the concession 00:07:05.940 --> 00:07:11.400 of having Mr. Game & Watch’s position on screen update at a smooth 60 frames per second, 00:07:11.400 --> 00:07:14.220 just like any other character on the roster. 00:07:14.220 --> 00:07:16.460 And thank goodness for that. 00:07:17.520 --> 00:07:20.760 This gets back to that same thing I was saying in the Mario episode: 00:07:20.760 --> 00:07:24.740 animating a Smash character is all about finding the balance between 00:07:24.740 --> 00:07:30.580 representing that character’s origins AND making them functionally work as a Smash fighter. 00:07:30.580 --> 00:07:35.260 At the end of the day, that’s the big animation challenge for ALL of these characters. 00:07:35.260 --> 00:07:37.860 And that had to be HARD with this guy, right? 00:07:37.860 --> 00:07:43.400 Like, so much of what makes those old games distinct is their extremely limited animation. 00:07:43.400 --> 00:07:49.380 You really CAN’T have Mr. Game & Watch move around like any other character and still FEEL like himself. 00:07:49.440 --> 00:07:52.680 And I love that they found an elegant solution to that: 00:07:52.680 --> 00:07:56.340 preserving the stiff, stuttery posing style of the source material, 00:07:56.340 --> 00:08:01.120 while also being willing to make big concessions for sake of visual clarity. 00:08:01.200 --> 00:08:05.980 His movement is still erratic and weird and it FEELS like it shouldn’t work, 00:08:05.980 --> 00:08:11.580 but it totally does, because all the visual information you really NEED is in there. 00:08:11.580 --> 00:08:12.920 Cool as heck, right? 00:08:13.080 --> 00:08:14.680 Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this! 00:08:14.680 --> 00:08:18.460 And let me know down in the comments if there are other characters you’d like me to dig into. 00:08:18.480 --> 00:08:20.540 If you want to hear more about Smash animation, 00:08:20.540 --> 00:08:23.200 here’s a playlist of all the characters I’ve covered so far. 00:08:23.200 --> 00:08:26.060 Have a good one, and I’ll see you next time!