Posted February 16, 2026 by Quarc Games
#split decision #art #game art #animation
Something that really makes a game pop, to me, is making the screen move. It doesn't even need to be maximalist, especially for story-heavy games like these, but it feels important to make the player know what to focus on.
In Split Decision, the main gameplay technically has two states - watching the fight occur and making an action between the fights. Listening to the characters is also important as they can give you hints on what to what for or even warn you that you are about to do a very, very big mistake.
Which is why my last month as an artist for the game mostly consisted of drawing animations of characters, with different emotional states that would change as they spoke. Mind you, I am not an animator by profession and animating anything in both 2D and 3D has been the biggest struggle for me during gamedev. But each time I make something I learn a lot, even if it takes some time to realise all the mistakes.
For example, I think I have redrawn the fighting sprites at least 3 times. And I will redraw them again because they still seem very static and stiff. If I could tell myself any advice two years ago when we started working on the game, it would be to use other artists' work as references for boxing and not just from actual boxing videos. Comics and anime turn out to be the best reference because their artists also work to exaggerate every movement where it counts, emphasizing body movement as much as possible.
Talking sprites, though?? They take a completely different approach, and to be honest I still don't know what is best for them. When I started doing animations it felt like it was not enough to make the mouth move and that I should make the chest/shoulders move as well. Now that I made a compilation of all the finished animations, it now feels like all the characters are either shrugging or ran out of breath. Which means I will have to redo these animations as well, but because of the amount of other work to do, this will be redone at the very end. I'm still pretty satisfied with how the characters turned out, and hope you will like them too when you play the game!
- M