Doing Animation Wright

I like the new Phoenix Wright game. It translated everything into 3D, so all the characters are 3D models (or very convincing pseudo-3D models). The art style survived almost entirely intact, aside from some damage to the way that hair looks.

But there is one big change that I think I finally figured out.

The motions inherited from the old games (TAKE THAT! WHHAAAAT!) look robotic and excessive. But not all the animations look robotic: a lot of animations originating in this game seem very natural and powerful. It's not universal. Some old motions translate very well, and some new motions are awkward.

It took me a while to figure out why that is.

It's the framerate.

The old games literally used animated GIFs. The frame rate was very low. Because of this, you couldn't really create secondary nuances very easily. Instead, you usually take advantage of the low framerate to put serious "pop" into your animations, the same way you might cut a frame out of a cartoon to give it some extra pop. So the classic style was to cut to just before the primary stance and use a simple "pop" animation to bring the stance to the fore. You put in plenty of exaggeration to make it pop properly.

The classic example is the "TAKE THAT" finger point, along with most of the other lawyer animations such as lashing a whip, pounding on the table, having toupees blown off, and so on. The panicked animations for various witnesses are also done like this. These are perfectly suited for the low frame rate - they take a simple stance and use a POP animation to transition into the final stance.

There are a lot of examples of nuanced animations in the old games, too, usually on the part of people who don't get excited. The most iconic is probably Trucy's bounce. Put her in her primary stance and then just create a subtle bounce. The secondary animation of her hair and cape follow in turn, and make it a very engaging animation. There are other examples, such as Gumshoe's head-scratch, but in all cases these subtler animations were fighting against the GIF format, squeezed into a low framerate and with a significant file size cost.

But in the new game, those are the animations that shine. With 4x the old frame rate and no significant file size problems, the animations can be as subtle as you like. Moreover, nuances and secondary events can easily be put in.

You can easily see this with Trucy's new bounce, which is identical to the old bounce except that the secondary animation is a really intricate ripple. Another clear example is the first witness' hair-pull action, where she tugs on her long braids and causes them to stretch. The new heroine's BLEAH face also has some really great nuanced animations that shine in this new format.

But the old animation style looks awkward and stilted. Just compare the hair pull animation from our first witness to two of her other animations: letting the hair bounce into her eyes, and pulling down a flower inhaler off her hat. Both of these are obviously done in the old style, with a simple starting pose followed by a straight-through exaggerated motion into the final pose. At eight frames a second, they would look great. At ~32, they look clumsy.

It's clear to me that the animation team was working through this same thought process and will probably continue to polish their presentation in later games.

I don't think that big gestures are coming to an end in Phoenix Wright. It's not the big gestures that are bad, it's the oldschool "pop" animation style. There are big gestures which work, such as Trucy's magic trick. But these gestures don't pop into exaggerated existence. Instead they follow a more refined style with standard pre-motion countermotion and a feeling of weight and substance. It is a better animation style, and it's the one they'll use now that they're no longer trapped by GIF.

Of course, the "POP" of the old animations will be missed... they'll have to find some way to make the new animations as explosive and iconic.

Wrightlike

I've had Phoenix Wright on the mind on and off. I was really sick yesterday, and built a Phoenix Wright engine. It's certainly not something perfect, but it made me think that maybe I should explain some of the details about what makes Phoenix Wright games Wrightlike.

It's easy to say "the writing", but that's a copout. Let's go over some of the facets that give these games their particular feel.

The most important aspect is that these games are relentlessly linear. There is one specific route forward, no deviations, no branches, no nothing. While there is space to explore, it's 90% color. Because the game is so linear, all the writing effort can be spent on the scenes that will definitely happen, knowing full well the exact path the player took to get here.

This is quite a limitation, but like all limitations, accepting it can open up new vistas of possibility. In this case, the super-rich environments and characters are possible only because of this limitation, and the way each case ticks over into the next with a strong continuity is also because of this.

Nearly all the writing and gameplay elements stem from this relentless linearity.

For example, the pacing of a Phoenix Wright game is a simple but unusual factor. I think of any part of the game as having a pacing which is the risk divided by the exploration capability.

In "exploration" mode, the only real risk is that the player will quit. And there's lots of places to explore. So it's a low-paced part of the game.

In "court" mode, there is some well-defined risk of losing health if you do specific things, but there's also a fair amount of riskless exploration in pushing and listening. So this is a kind of medium-paced part of the game.

In "lockbreak" mode, every move you make is a health risk. There is absolutely nothing to explore. This laser-like focus makes this the most pushingly-paced part of the game.

In actuality, I split these three up into five, because exploration mode has three grades: "wander" mode in early midgame where you get to explore loads of places, "investigate" mode where the number of places is reduced and the amount of interplay between objects increases, and "inspect" mode, where there are only a few places you can go/people you can talk to (for example, if you're locked in a basement).

These pacing tricks can be extrapolated out into a wider variety of games - the amount of risky exploration/choice vs the amount of risk-free exploration. Through this lens, you can see a lot of games taking the same kind of approach. However, there are also games where you have risk-free zones that have no real exploration - hubs, basically. These hubs are very useful to a not-so-relentlessly-linear game where you might have the option to customize things or take different approaches.

Another factor to the Wrightlike games is their puzzles. The puzzle quality varies - it isn't rare to fall out of synch with the script writers and end up either stuck or trying desperately to solve a puzzle that isn't what they want you to solve.

However, setting aside the quality, the puzzles have a slightly unusual timbre to them. The puzzles are relentlessly linear, as mentioned. Unlike normal adventure game puzzles, there's not a world where several puzzles lie in wait. The puzzle coming down the line in a Wrightlike game is the only puzzle, at least at the moment. Other puzzles may be tied to it, but they cannot be dealt with at the present time.

This means that all the inventory stuff, color text, and hints you give out are focused like a laser on the next puzzle. This is a distinctively different feel than you get from an adventure game where there might be four puzzles itching at the back of your mind while you collect stuff.

I think this gives the Wrightlike games an unusually tight, fluid flow to them. Of course, it also gives them a clogged-drain-style flow when the player can't solve a puzzle, which is a downside. Being forced to replay a mission after losing too much health is also unusually onerous, since you have to go through things in precisely the same order again.

Anyway, I'm not normally a fan of linear games. However, to paraphrase Ebert, I may disapprove of a game for going too linear, and yet have a sneaky regard for a game that goes much, much more linear than merely too linear. Embracing this linearity is, I think, what makes Wrightlike games so unique and enjoyable.