Our game, Weltraum (https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/42/weltraum-1), is a visual novel where you must perform space-based actions to progress through the story. At some point, a mech enters the stage, and although most of our graphics/animation range from mediocre to straight bad and confusing, we took the transforming animation of the mech at heart. Here's what it looks like in-game :

Nothing too fancy, yet nothing in the game comes close in terms in animation. That's because, being totally incapable of traditional animation, we used a fairly well-known technique named rotoscoping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotoscoping).

It simply consists in filming an action performed in the real world, and to draw stuff on top of the obtained frames. It's notably known as the way Jordan Mechner obtained the animations for the first Prince of Persia. You can see it in action it the video below, as used during the development of Eric Chahi's "Another World".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhGtYfpmxyY

Mechner's use of the technique is so iconic that the tool used for Weltraum is call "Paint of Persia". It's actually awesome, and I strongly advise to check it out here : https://dunin.itch.io/ptop

Going on with our animation : we could have used some random anime footage, but we decided to take another path, and went on to use a Gundam Plastic Model (the HGUC Methuss), moved in stop-motion.

In practice, we took a picture of the model in its ship form, then moved it a little, took another picture, moved it again, ... until we got the mech in its humanoid form. Here are some of the said pictures :

The next step was using Paint of Persia to draw a rough sprite on top of our pictures :

The final step was to cleanup the sprites with Piskel (https://www.piskelapp.com/) :

In the end, we were really happy with our modest result. We were, however, able to use this technique only because of the low interactivity of our visual novel. The sprite cleanup proved to be really time-consuming, and had we some true gameplay to balance, we wouldn't have been able to use rotoscoping.

Aaand that's all for this post. Do not hesitate to check out our game and to link yours in the commentaries in case you used the same technique or have a mech in your game. And as a goodie, here's our Methuss in all its unpainted glory :