Stop Overanimating Your Idle States
Or: Learn to Love Subtlety
Overanimation: A style of animation where a character's movements are excessively exaggerated, resulting in unnatural, overly energetic, or distracting motions that don't align with the context or the character's intended behavior.
This is a crime I’ve come across primarily in indie games, especially 90s-inspired JRPGs. Chained Echoes was the first game I consciously noticed it in, but Sea of Stars was the one that really irked me. Look at this clip of Sea of Star’s combat, paying special attention to Zale—the blond—in the player’s party:
They’re moving around like they’re trying to get their cardio in for the day! It’s a shame too, as the sprite work looks very nice when in a still frame, but turns amateurish once it starts moving. It’s a mystery why they went in this direction, but let’s speculate why this might happen.
Misapplying Exaggeration: Good animation uses exaggeration to emphasize a state change, making the motion more dynamic and visually engaging. A classic example from hand-drawn animation is a character’s body squishing into a crouch before jumping—this exaggeration makes the movement look fluid and adds anticipation, tricking your brain into seeing a lot more action than if it were realistic. In Sea of Stars, the exaggeration we see is in the speed of the animation but, unlike the jumping example, it isn’t brief enough to create a convincing illusion. Because it loops, it lacks the emphasis on a clear change of state and ends up feeling like wild flailing instead.
Cargo Cult Mimicry: Many indie devs try to copy the aesthetics of the games they grew up with, often without understanding the reasons behind the original design choices. Case in point: anyone with eyes can see Sea of Stars is heavily influenced by Chrono Trigger. The problem is it attempts a 1:1 replication of the characters’ exaggerated movements, who moved as they did due to technical limitations. With a resolution of just 320x200, even a single pixel of movement made a noticeable difference because each pixel represented a physical space of several inches. Thus, the low fidelity caused players to focus less on precise positioning and more on directionality and motion. This effect doesn't work at higher resolutions, where the increased pixel density means each pixel represents a smaller unit of physical space, leaving less room for interpretive flexibility in high-res art. As an analogy, older games were are stage plays; because the audience is far away from the actors, broad, exaggerated gestures read as natural and expressive. This same kind of movement on a high-res cinema screen would look unnatural and ridiculous.
A Fear of Looking Boring: I suspect there’s a belief that if nothing is moving on the screen, the player might feel like nothing is happening. It’s easy to assume that stillness could bore the player, and this may lead to overanimation to compensate.
With why out of the way, what can an aspiring indie dev do to avoid this heinous visual crime? Here’s a few pointers:
Stop Copying: Draw inspiration from the classics; they’re classics for a reason. But don’t feel the need to copy every element from them, even if you’re doing an homage. You want to capture the spirit, not replicate how it looks. I covered this for Sea of Stars in Cargo Cult Mimicry, so we won’t rehash that point.
Use Real Life References: Although game art will be exaggerated, you need to have a realistic baseline to exaggerate from. I’m not telling you to watch HEMA tournaments—though that wouldn’t hurt—but even live-action movie sword fights will give you a better idea of how people move. Applied to Sea of Stars, we’d see Zale with a more natural looking idle, rather than the awkward lunging forward we see now. If it’s intended for him to look high energy, he may move more like a champion boxer as opposed to a disciplined martial arts master.
Go For A Sprint: I’m serious. Get up, go outside, and sprint as hard as you can for at least 30 seconds. Catch your breath until you can talk without gasping—by now, you should be breathing deeply. Pay attention to how long it takes to inhale and exhale, and notice how much your chest and shoulders rise and fall. Take notes, because you’re setting a baseline for how much movement to expect from someone who was just active. What we’d expect to see if applied in Sea of Stars are slower idles with less drastic movement.
Simple enough, right? Let’s rein it in a bit. If you’re a would-be indie artist reading this and have the inclination to animate characters like wacky waving inflatable tube men, stop. Go for a run.
Bonus: While the right animation is clearly a joke, it still serves as a good example of why you should avoid overanimation.