This guide takes a unique look at The Flame in the Flood through the lens of animation and technical artistry. Gwen Frey, a tech artist, animator, and studio co-founder, shares her experience animating quadruped characters for the game, explaining both the creative and technical challenges faced during development. If you’re a fan of game design, animation, or are curious about how animals in games come to life, this breakdown will take you behind the scenes.

Quadruped Animation Challenges

Unlike bipeds, quadrupeds pose unique animation problems. Gwen focused her process on solving three core problems before polishing:

1. Forward locomotion (moving through the world)
2. Turning behavior
3. Transitioning between idle and motion

By solving these, she could maintain fluid movement while preparing for gameplay-driven animation behavior.

Boar Animation Strategy

The boar character in The Flame in the Flood is cartoony and low to the ground. It idles, charges like a battering ram, and returns to idle. Gwen chose to use a linear blend approach for this character’s locomotion—much like a biped system—because it mostly moves at consistent speeds. She animated multiple trot variations (slow, medium, fast), keeping footfalls synced to ensure smooth blending between animations.

A blend space was used in Unreal Engine 4 to interpolate between these animations based on speed. Because the boar’s motion is cartoonish and exaggerated, Gwen could get away with unrealistic blending. The blend space also incorporated turning, driven by directional angles, using a strafing motion for extreme turns instead of spine twists.

Wolf Animation Strategy

The wolf is agile and meant to circle the player, modulating its speed naturally. Unlike the boar, its locomotion needed a more dynamic and realistic feel. Gwen authored a walk, trot, and gallop separately, since linear blending wouldn’t work—these gaits have fundamentally different foot phasing.

To make transitions seamless, she scaled each animation’s play rate based on character velocity. This method avoids needing intermediary transitions and creates smooth gait changes while minimizing foot sliding. Any foot sliding that did occur during faster motion went mostly unnoticed due to the wolf’s high speed.

Solving Turning for Quadrupeds

Turning is significantly harder for quadrupeds. For the wolf, Gwen wrote a system that:

• Reads the difference between movement direction and facing direction
• Divides that angle among spine joints
• Bends the spine accordingly

This creates a natural lean and turn effect, where the front limbs orient toward the movement vector and the back follows. It mirrors how a real animal turns. Additionally, the wolf is programmed to never turn in place—instead, it always moves slightly forward to initiate a turn, like a car.

For the boar, she used a more rigid, blend-space-driven approach. The boar always looks either toward movement or directly at the player. Turning is handled by authoring variations of the trot animations with turn offsets baked in. This method maintains the boar’s cohesive, single-mass feel.

Stopping and Starting Transitions

Transitions from movement to idle are a major pain point in quadruped animation. Unlike bipeds, where you can just animate two foot-planted versions (left and right), quadrupeds can have any combination of feet touching the ground, making it much harder to predict.

Gwen’s solution was to:

• Use the final pose of the locomotion animation
• Pull any lifted limbs down to the ground
• Freeze the walk animation with play rate set to zero
• Blend into a custom “feet-planted” idle version

This method creates seamless stops without sliding or ugly foot snapping. When the character moves again, the walk animation resumes from where it left off.

Additive Idles and Foot Locking

Once the character is frozen, it shouldn’t just stay still. Gwen created additive idle animations (like head tilts or tail flicks) that play over the frozen pose. However, this introduced foot swimming, especially when the base hip joint was rotated.

To solve this:

• For the boar, she re-parented the hoof joints directly to the root and reversed joint chains (no IK needed). This locked the feet in place with no swimming, and the upper body motion remained undetectable.
• For the wolf, she used in-game IK to pin paws to their pre-additive world positions, maintaining visual consistency without modifying the skeleton.

IK and Performance Considerations

Early in development, performance concerns made Gwen cautious about relying on constant IK, especially for characters like the boar that might exist in larger numbers. For the wolf, she used IK early on and planned to revisit its necessity after profiling. If performance issues arise, she might replace the IK system with her boar-style fix.

Additional Characters and Approaches

Beyond the wolf and boar, the team also animated other creatures like a bear and dog. Each one required a unique setup:

• The bear moves almost like a rabbit and uses independent motion for front and back limbs.
• The dog combines techniques from both wolf and boar, acting as a hybrid in terms of movement fidelity and system complexity.

These differences prove that no one-size-fits-all solution exists for quadrupeds—each has to be approached based on its behavior, function, and design intent.

Final Thoughts: Practical Quadruped Animation

When animating quadrupeds, Gwen recommends this general workflow:

1. Solve forward motion first—it defines the feel and pacing of the character.
2. Address turning next—it’s the trickiest and most technical part.
3. Nail the stop/start transition—blend into grounded poses and use additive animations.

Ultimately, blend spaces, additive layers, custom rigging, and selective IK can all be used creatively to animate complex quadrupeds without breaking immersion or performance. Gwen’s dual approach—high-tech when needed, low-tech when effective—demonstrates how thoughtful design and animation can bring even non-humanoid characters to life in a convincing and emotionally resonant way.

This was a behind-the-scenes look at The Flame in the Flood’s animation pipeline, straight from the developer’s perspective. For fans, animators, or technical artists, it’s a powerful example of animation-driven gameplay and design in action.