Making animations of any kind is a difficult task, but in a game things get ultimately more complicated. Unlike a cartoon, game animations can rarely be predefined. They have to consider what's happening in the game, and who it's happening to. Consequently, there's much more to the moves in Federation Booker than meets the eye...

Composing a Frame
Every wrestling move begins by figuring out what position each wrestler should be in for each frame of animation. To do this I made a whole other program that lets me manipulate 2 test wrestlers, like puppets. I simply browse through the hundreds of possible stances, for each wrestler, and move them around the screen until I find a good combination...

Recording a Frame
Once a frame looks good on the screen, I scribble down the numerical info that makes it look like that. The key info is: the image that each wrestler uses, the horizontal position on screen, the vertical position on screen, who should be in front/behind, which direction each should face, and most important of all - a doodle that reminds me what the frame looks like. To store all that info as neatly as possible, I print out dozens of specially designed worksheets. After a frame of animation has been recorded, I go back to the program and compose the next frame, and so on, until the whole move is on file...

Coding a Frame
The pages of scribbles are then painstakingly typed into the game's main code. This tells the computer what to do with the character in question, and his victim, at each stage of the animation. At this point other details are added, such as when an impact should occur and what the effects of that should be. Once the whole move has been coded, all that remains is to put the move into someone's arsenal and see how it looks...

Enjoying a Frame
This is a critical time for the move. Very rarely does a move look okay first time. There's always something out of place, or something that could be improved. In that event, it's back to the code to figure out what's wrong and fix it. However, sometimes a move will look so bad that it's beyond salvation - and all that work will turn out to have been a waste of time!