Don’t Starve has a fantastic horror-inspired art style, and in this tutorial I’m going
to show you how to design and animate your own 2D character in that style.
We’re going to make a playable character, but I will also give tips on what to do for
original creatures.
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Let’s start with sketching a character design.
Don’t worry about the lineart style yet: just focus on getting the shapes how you want
them.
Here are the design rules.
Overly large head; every character has a unique head shape.
Eyes can be black dots, black lines, or white-filled.
Shadows around eyes are common.
Most characters have black hair, but color is definitely allowed.
Don’t forget ears, if visible.
Rectangular body.
Arms are sticks with top sleeve and meaty hand.
Legs are sticks with shoes.
Some Don’t Starve characters break a style rule or two, so if you need to for your design
go ahead.
Your design will also look more believable if the character isn’t happy, though a crazed
expression works pretty well too.
“I’ve been harvesting Pokemon for 20 years and I still can’t win a league.”
Every major body part has a closed outline: heads, legs, bodies, hands, and so on.
For creature designs this is also true most of the time, common exceptions being where
arms join the body.
The bigger a monster gets the more complicated its body parts and more often you’ll have
an incomplete outline for animation reasons.
Overall, if you can keep a body part contained in its own outline, it’ll make animation
easier.
That’s why muzzles usually have a closed outline.
Next step is to draw the pieces for your animation rig.
I’m using Toon Boom today, but you can use any animation program with layers and tweens.
Take your sketch and draw the outlines for each piece.
Very important: the face must get its own layer so it can float around on the skull.
In the end you’ll have pieces like this.
To get the outline style, use a thin round brush with no texture.
Rather than draw the perfect thickness right off the bat, take your thin brush and build
up the line with one or two more strokes.
As you do this, imperfections will happen naturally.
Leave all that in.
You might want to clean it up a bit, but that is how you get the style.
You can put a game character piece on the canvas to make sure your lines are the right
thickness.
Important outlines are thicker.
Details are thinner and sketchier.
If a character part has multiple different colors, a black line usually separates the
colors.
Draw those in now.
Next is coloring.
To fill in any black areas, take your brush and scribble over the area, then erase everything
outside the outline.
Your scribble should be straight lines that follow the grain of the area.
Make this a different color so you can actually see to erase.
Back fill the scribble with your color of choice.
Fill in your other parts with dull versions of the original colors.
Your end result should be like this.
Not this.
Normally for a white character you would use pure white for the skin, but I’d like to
get a bit of a darker skin tone, so I’m going to try this.
Set the control points for your pieces, duplicate and flip the arm and leg.
Your character is ready to animate!
I’m going to show you how to animate an idle cycle and a run cycle for this front
perspective.
What to pay attention to for the Don’t Starve animation style: 1) The face often moves out
of sync from the head, and sometimes on its own for things like nods or head shakes.
2) Make every animated action with as few pieces as possible.
There are a lot of sudden snaps from one piece to another - no frame by frame drawn transitions.
Animate movement with tweens, lots of squash and stretch.
For idle, create two keyframes.
One at the top of the cycle, stretched up, arms together.
One at the bottom, squashed down, arms out.
Do not move the legs.
Repeat the first keyframe at the end of the cycle.
Apply ease in, ease out to the keyframes.
Move the keyframes for the arms so they are delayed.
To make the delay loop you have to create keyframes where the cycle ends, copy them.
Then push back the keyframes on frame 1, and paste the copied keyframe on frame 1.
This is a really useful thing to know how to do in any animation, really.
Add some keyframes in the middle of the hands and rotate them to make them swing.
Delay the face a few frames.
Delay hair, and add some squash and stretch to it.
Finished.
To animate a run, start with the first keyframe - I’m choosing to do the top of the run
cycle.
You will need to draw a front facing hand and a bent leg.
I also drew a U-shaped leg for the back pose.
Pose your pieces in this general shape.
Second keyframe: the contact position.
The lead foot is just touching the ground.
Body is traveling down.
Next keyframe - the bottom of the run cycle, bent knee.
This happens right after the foot hits the ground.
The body is the most squashed and lowered here.
Fourth keyframe is when the leg is straight up and down, pushing the body up again.
Just by playing these four keyframes you should see how the animation will look.
Check to make sure things are flowing okay.
Then, copy the animation for the left arm and paste it to the end of the right arm.
Do the same for the leg and all opposing limbs.
Copy and paste the four frame cycle for the body and head.
This will give you the 8 base frames for a run.
Theoretically you can tween these and it’ll be 16 frame run.
However, the Don’t Starve run is very poppy, so there are no inbetween frames between keys
2,3,4 and 6,7,8.
The feet only touch the ground for 2 frames each side.
All of the inbetweens are crammed between 8 and 2 and 4 and 6.
To make your animation true to the mood add a filter that yellows out the whites and vignette
lighting to shadow the corners of the screen.
You might be wondering: can you mod your character into the game?
Yes.
However, it’s a hellish mess to figure out.
It was faster for me to animate all of this on my own.
If you can get a mod to work, all of the animations are done for you.
But it takes many hours to mod unless you reskin an existing character (even then it’s
a lot of hours).
That’s the end of this tutorial: the next one is how to animate the Paper Mario style.
My inspiration for these comes from your suggestions, so comment below!
You can get tutorials and animations early by joining my Patreon.