GoKawiilWe’re working on an adventure game, Leonardo’s Moon Ship. The player character, Leo, has the usual pile of animations: idle left and right, walk in four directions, a couple of stair anims. Since implementing the basics of the character, Leo has had this slightly cursed behaviour where he’d grow about 3% taller the moment he started walking, then shrink back when he stopped. His feet would also lift off the ground by up to 27 pixels depending on which way he was facing. Not enough to be obviously broken in a screenshot. Exactly enough to make the game feel wrong.
That’s the bug overlaid on itself. The red ghost is the naive setup. The blue is the fixed version. When Leo’s idle they sit on top of each other. The second a walk anim kicks in the red drifts up and out of place.
Why a single scale falls over
The animations came from the artists on wildly inconsistent canvases. Not the character, the canvas the character was painted on. Here’s the actual sizes:
idle_right: 675x1095, character tight-cropped
idle_left: 616x1094, basically the same character, slightly different crop
walk_right and walk_left: 1920x1200, but Leo himself is only about 700x1088 and floating somewhere inside all that transparent space
walk_up: 664x1202
walk_down: 664x1202
This is normal. Artists work in whatever canvas size makes sense for the motion they’re drawing. Walk cycles need horizontal room for the stride, idle frames don’t. And good luck enforcing a single canvas size across hundreds of frames and constant revisions.
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