Dragon's Crown breakdown

Alright so after deep study of Dragon's Crown. the game is simple yet looks complicated.

my analysis is the following!

the background environments variate from 4 to 7 layers with parallax style camera movement, which is basic stuff for next-Gen 2D games.

but! what puzzled me at that time was if the background was a single painting or reused assets?

and the attached picture will prove my point ( and of course after observation of many levels through out my play-through.

the assets are reused and smartly painted to fit together as a whole,carefully placed together to look unique and stand out from others, specially with their color modification filters that they change to give a level its mood.

players will be busy admiring the whole scene not single places or a single pillar which gives the illusion that everything has its own identity and unique from floor to ceilings and pillars and other assets throughout the game without the player spotting reused elements.

when again it is just assets that smartly and carefully put together to look unique without effecting the machine that it is running on.

conclusion : assets was painted and placed together to build a level, of course with the help of their color filters.

Dragon's crown Animation:

Dragon's crown animations is very unique and intelligently done but not hard to do.

how was it done!?

the picture attached is taken from Dragon's crown artbook, and it shows all the moves that the amazon fighter does.

all of these of course are broken to pieces to be animated Spriter style.

and you wonder how these combos are done!? with all these transitions!

after deep observation to that the Animation in dragon's crown is kind of a fake animation with fake transition that makes you feel it is actually animating, of course there are the runs, walk cycles and other stuff but no transitions between animation to another.

the only animation that is happening is by the drawings that you see in the attached picture, the animation snaps from one move to another and it just moves the pieces around for the next frame of a strike or whatever attack or action the character is doing, more like tweening.

the animation formula is snap! one frame to another and move around the piece of the 2nd frame to create an illusion of follow through, so it goes by keyframes, key frame 1 the anticipation, and that anticipation frame is broken down to limbs, body, etc, given a slight tween, a frame of blur to the next action keyframe and that is also broken down to be able to move it to simulate follow through and give the illusion of a complex animation happening.

walk cycles and run cycles are just a single image that is broken down and moved around.

more complex animations = just more pieces to move around.

example of walk cycles : https://64.media.tumblr.com/cc6ba2a367e4269b84d04e3d9ec9e497/tumblr_mk1w9n8LW61rt6jibo3_250.gif

I hope this was helpful.