Sorry, feeling talky tonight. Third cup of coffee.
Death animation for me was so friggin tricky to figure out. Initially, as a placeholder in the original beta build way back, I just put a copy of the classic 8 bit mega man death. Humorously enough, some testers played the game and didn't recognize the reference, and just thought it was my idea. Many of them liked it.
When it came time to put a more final death animation in, so many of my cooler ideas kind of spoiled things a bit too much or made it a bit too overt the nature of the story and the character. You don't want to undermine your story with a death animation. That's a pickle.
So I said, okay, let's just make it simple. The player falls back and hits the ground. I drew all of those animation frames and coded it in, but it just lacked impact. It felt odd. It lacked drama.
At the time I had recently been playing The Last of Us. I liked the death animations, they were effective in conveying shock because you suddenly see something bad happening (like a clicker gnawing your neck or whatever) and we get some shocking sounds but basically doesn't linger, it just cuts out. You get some sudden horror, but before you have much time to dwell on it, it's over. I realized THAT is the way to do it.
So I have the character sort of float back as the screen shakes, purple energy exploding out of it, but the whole thing cuts to black before you get a lot of time to think about it.
