Between October 2015 till the day I left Gumi, I was working on a mobile game project called Brave Frontier, which deals with a lot of pixel art character animations.
Initially, I started off as pixel and storyboard artist, taking on in-house art creation duties for the global version of the game. After about a year into the job, I was leading a small team of animators in the animation production and checking on the work of external vendors.
Attack Animation for Fire Maiden Unit (5 stars)
Idle
Attack Animation for White Maiden Unit (5 Stars)
Idle
Centipede monster's attack animation.
The animated storyboard that is used to create the pixel animations.
Idle animation
There are three main character states for each character: An Idle, a Move state and an Attack state. The concept artist would pass on the confirmed character designs to the animator, who would then start creating storyboards for the character. The storyboards would then be vetted by the game designer to see if it matches their design criteria and then confirmed for pixel art making.
During my time on the project, I was lucky to be able to work with other big titles in the industry through game event collaborations. The above unit was a collaboration with Final Fantasy: Brave Exvius as well as with the Europe team of Gumi. The European branch's artist created the base image of the character while I took on the animation work for it. The actions were based on an earlier unit created by Japan Gumi as the Global team had wanted the characters to take on some similarities with the characters from the world of Brave Frontier.
While most of my time were later spent on liasing with different departments, creating feedback and guiding fellow animators, I still managed to squeeze out some storyboards to keep my skills honed. Pixel arts creation were minimized to solely edits of vendor work as schedules were pretty tight to bounce the work around.