Combat & Locomotion Animation Set
A nine-month animation contract for a mobile action RPG: 780 clips covering combat, locomotion and hit reactions across 24 playable characters. Astel Games worked from reference capture and hand-key, then wired every clip into Unity Animator blend trees that the client's own engineers could extend.
- Client
- Confidential — mobile RPG studio
- Engine
- Unity
- Platforms
- iOS, Android
- Year
- 2023
- Duration
- 9 months
- Team size
- 9 animators
- Disciplines
- Character animation, Combat feel support, Technical animation
- Category
- Animation
Artwork from our archive. High-resolution originals are available on request under NDA.
What the client needed.
The combat cadence depended on eight-frame anticipation windows that left no room for soft interpolation. Earlier outsourced clips had been rejected for inconsistent timing between characters, and the client needed to ship new skills without returning to us for every addition.
- Recorded reference video of martial-arts and weightlifting motions, then retimed everything to the eight-frame anticipation rule.
- Locked a shared timing sheet per character class so all 24 characters hit identical contact frames.
- Built 60 additive hit-reaction clips that layer over any base locomotion without breaking foot placement.
- Exported every clip through a validation script checking root motion, frame range and curve naming.
- Held two live review calls weekly, with the client's combat designer marking up footage frame by frame.
- 780 clips delivered, with 94% approved on the first review pass against 61% previously.
- Average clip length held at 1.4 seconds, keeping the build inside its 45 MB animation budget.
- The client's designers shipped 40 further skills using our blend-tree template without new animation work.
Have a similar production coming up?
Tell us the scope and the date. We will tell you what it takes — honestly, including what we would not promise.