Qualities Affecting Player Experience of Procedural and Semi-Procedural Character Animations
플레이어 경험에 영향을 미치는 절차적 및 반절차적인 캐릭터 애니메이션의 특성
- 주제(키워드) procedural animation , semi-procedural animation , character animation , responsiveness , animation appeal
- 주제(DDC) 302.23
- 발행기관 아주대학교 일반대학원
- 지도교수 Laine Teemu
- 발행년도 2024
- 학위수여년월 2024. 2
- 학위명 석사
- 학과 및 전공 일반대학원 미디어학과
- 실제URI http://www.dcollection.net/handler/ajou/000000033662
- 본문언어 영어
- 저작권 아주대학교 논문은 저작권에 의해 보호받습니다.
초록/요약
Procedural animations can allow a game to utilize its real-time and nonlinear elements in a different way making animations feel responsive and appealing. This study was conducted in order to show which qualities semi- and fully procedural animation methods can add to the responsiveness and appeal of an endless runner game. It used freely available projects (Rosen, 2019/2023) and methods to create game animations that were found both responsive and appealing to players. The sample size of the study was 24 participants (mean age: 26) where over half of the participants were either Vietnamese or Korean, while the remaining were mainly from Asia, apart from two of the participants. A combination of descriptive statistics, two-way AnoVAs and correlation tests were used to analyze self ratings of enjoyment, performance, control, responsiveness, appeal, quality, and character design. In order to contribute with qualitative findings to previous research (Normoyle & Jörg, 2018) that inspired the study, initial coding for thematic analysis was used to find common themes and specific qualities affecting the different measures focusing on responsiveness and appeal. Based on its results this study articulates rough guidelines for creators to discover what qualities to focus on when developing procedural animation systems. The semi- and fully procedural animation techniques bring benefits to both responsiveness and appeal, where the fully procedural animation system used requires programming experience but provides smooth results, while the semi- procedural animation technique provides creative freedom for animators not well-versed in programming. This study demonstrates how different qualities affect responsiveness and appeal of a stylized primate character through participants’ ratings and opinions about the character in a simple endless runner game. In the fully procedural version, comments on qualities like character transition delays upon landing/ jumping and moving straight through branches instead of following the curve of these, all negatively affected responsiveness, while appeal was affected positively by how the motion was said to breathe life into an otherwise unappealing and robot-like character design. Semi-procedural versions negatively affected responsiveness because of qualities that complicate landing prediction as well as the character’s obscured eyes, which also detracted from the appeal of the character. Movements that were considered less ape-like also impacted appeal negatively such as the jump while the more ape-like movements such as the swing and slide animations had a positive effect on it. Overall, qualities affecting responsiveness negatively were the character’s speed, clunky turning mechanics, lack of control for the jump and swing were subject to grief in all versions, while the double jump feature had a positive effect. The implications of the study are simpler avenues for rapid prototyping of semi-procedural animations that bring satisfactory results within a short time-frame for a game development project.
more목차
Introduction 1
Background 7
Perceived Responsiveness 7
Appeal in Character Animation 8
Procedural animation 9
Method 11
Stimuli 11
Creating Responsive Animations 18
Creating Appealing Animations 21
Gameplay Experiment 22
Player Participants 22
Experiment setup 22
Survey data collection 23
Follow-up Interview 24
Data analysis 24
Results 25
Quantitative gameplay results 25
Enjoyment 25
Performance 26
ANOVA 27
Qualitative Gameplay Results 29
Common Themes 29
Familiarization and Shift in Focus 30
Responsiveness 30
Expectations of Gameplay, Controls and Animations 33
Appeal 34
Feature Requests, Missing Features & Music 35
Discussion 38
On Enjoyment 38
On Responsiveness and Appeal 39
Game ‘Feel’ as it relates to Responsiveness 39
Game Context as it relates to Appeal 40
Applying the Game Fundamentals 40
On Other Qualities 41
Contribution and Implications of the study 43
Limitations 45
Future work 46
Conclusion 50
References 52
Appendix 62
