Rocket League
Animation
Rocket League Championship Series Credit Roll
90 second credit roll for the The Rocket League Championship Series (RLCS) 2021-22 season event. This event is streamed to millions, with a prize pool of millions.
For those who don't know, Rocket League is a competitive soccer video game featuring supersonic acrobatic cars that can fly. A game Latham and I have played 100+ hours of.
CLIENT
Bento gg / Psyonix
ANIMATION
Latham Arnott
Concept & Story
Inspired by Pixar and Marvel movie credit rolls as the client, I wanted to play with a lo-fi art style with a low frame rate. We made each car have a ton of character and brought them to life in animation.
We yanked a lot of movements from from memes around the competitive game culture. This game has a lot of esoteric little jokes and ways of playing we thought the fans would appreciate as a nod.
For instance, jumping on top of one another after a goal is scored in celebration.
3,122,968 Views on the stream.
The reception on the intermission animation was exceptional from client and viewers.
DESIGN SYSTEM
In Rocket League, players can customize their cars based on the base body, wheels, antennas, hats (topper) paint jobs, colors, etc. We knew that'd be a fun and important feature to draw.
Layering on different coats of paint
There are hundreds of different paints you can put on the cars, I made sure to hit a few of the more well known ones, like an animated flaming dacal.
We knew we could start animation on the base cars while we developed the different paint colors, hats, wheels, etc.
Later, we could simply swap layers out in animation without disturbing much of the animation. We also wanted to be able to create some 20+ cars without going crazy drawing.
Infinite Outcomes
We wanted to try to find a way to break the expectations of 2D Rocket League.
Psyonix has developed an identifiable visual language for Rocket League which is rich soil to get creative in. The question was, "How much can we bend the style while still having fans immediately recognize it as Rocket League?"
The client had a lot of trust with us in our vision for a flat, 2d, low frame rate style of the game.
We drew realistically first, keeping proportions on model and then started playing with perspective and stripping back details. Eventaully we focused on a strong silhouette and drifted as far as we could.
At first we were just going to use all black backgrounds, WALL•E and Monsters Inc, but we thought it'd be cool if we made some simple backgrounds to rotate around with some parallax.
Backgrounds
Fortunately the game also features a lot of different highly identifiable and unique worlds the games are played in. It was a great challenge to try and push the backgrounds stylistically as far as we could, cashing in on the familiarity fans have for the world.
We set a foundation with a low fidelity illustration style, so going with 12 frame per second animation helped to enhance that.
However, movements and poses had to be well defined and snappy to ensure readability. At times, cars flip over within just a single frame.
The backgrounds were animated intentionally slow and smooth to ensure they didn't distract from the animation of the cars.
