A long time has passed since the second trailer and the last behind-the-scenes look at REPLACED. And today I want to touch on a new topic — the animation of the game.

The game has come a tremendously long way since our first simple asset store-purchased animation pack, the first in-house animated sprite of an idly standing unnamed hero (who later will become known as R.E.A.C.H.), then to an actually controllable walk cycle and, couple years later, to what we have today.

When tackling the animation, we are following 3 main principles, all of which were defined very early and had been present to this day:

1) Handcraft

All of the game's animations are hand-drawn, which means we are not taking any shortcuts when producing those literal hundreds of sprites. Maybe in the future we will use other tools and techniques, and we have tried many, but with REPLACED we really want to honour the craft.

2) Realism

The tone of the game, the setting and design goals we set early on are the things that naturally dictate the style of animation. It's made to be believable, alive and beautiful, while also balancing to be integrated for comfortable and responsive game play, unlike the cinematic platformers of the past, where realism of movement and technical limitations dictated a much less comfortable game play approach.

What really is an icing on the cake, in my opinion, is that we have developed a system to double down on an almost continuous, cut-free movement. It means that almost every move or state in the game is interconnected with other moves through a fully animated transition, which almost looks like an animated 3D model.

3) Impact

While removing the hassle of what came with the limitations of the past, we really wanted to somehow still capture this feeling of weight and action impact, so the character will be perceived like a person, rather than a freely floating block in the world. After a ton of experimentation I personally believe we have found something of a sweet spot.

Pulling this off required a lot of stress and a lot of iteration to get that feeling of silky-smooth continuously animated characters, which behave realistically in a cut scene, in platforming, or in combat.

As we are closing in on finishing the full move set of our protagonist, counting more than couple hundred pieces of animation alone, I personally believe this will be one of, if not the most complex pixel-art game ever made.

Keep a look out for more development blog updates!

Join the official REPLACED Discord Server[discord.gg] for news and to keep in touch with the community outside of Steam.

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Wishlist REPLACED now:

https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1663850/REPLACED/

One of the make or break features of such heavily stylized games is lighting.

As you have seen in the trailer we are utilising a lot of volumetric lights to create rich, dense, and high quality atmosphere.

That said, we had to rely on a lot of plugins last year to get to a level of quality we were after. That approach was at the very least… inefficient. In the real world it just runs badly. It is very conflict-spreading with other 3rd party assets and in some cases just plain outdated.

As we had moved to our custom rendering tech at the end of last year -- we have been slowly crawling towards our goal of implementing back all the features we wanted to be done our way and one of those features is finally available for me to test -- custom made, state of the art volumetric lighting and density volumes.

It looks far better than things we used before, it is made in-house and is tailored to compliment the game perfectly.

It allows us to flexibly add things such as:

Dust
Fog
Mist
Light Shafts
etc.

This all contributes to cinematic lighting and composition to enable us to create the desired atmosphere. Once again an amazing feat by our graphics engineer!

GIFs shown are not final but can give you some idea of what to expect, as well as some new amazing assets by our team.

Wishlist REPLACED now.

https://gtm.you1.cn/storesteam/app/1663850/REPLACED/

Join the official REPLACED discord server[discord.gg] for more updates & to chat with our community.

Follow REPLACED on X.