Hi! Today's devlog is about animations! Probably one of the most important things in R18 game development.

As you know very well, animations are the most necessary thing for R18 games. I won't explain the reason, since you yourself can understand that an animated scene is much better than a non-animated one.

But why doesn't everyone animate then? Well... because it's hard. Instead of one art, you need to draw 4, 6 or more arts/frames and make them consistent! And even drawn frames can look terrible if you combine them into an animation!

Why is that? Animation is the process of "reviving" art and sometimes even the simplest action can be implemented differently! Today I will touch on the topic of basic animation and how it is created.

As always, it is best to talk about the topic by showing an example, so here it is:

This is the basic art from which animation starts! But how to animate it? If you are thinking about starting to create frames or something like that, you have already fallen into the trap of "simplicity" of animation.
Here is the same art but without color:

Why is it important and what is the trap? That animating by color is more of a problem than a animation. Any animation must be designed from the beginning whether the art will be animated or not! And this is very important and applies to ANY animation! And as you can see, I saved the lines of the art to animate it later, and simplify my work.
But if you pay attention to the art, you will notice one problem. Is it planned to animate sex or just the entrance into the girl? Because if you animate sex, then there will be a problem, the dick is too far from the entrance and this art is not a keyframe!
What is a keyframe? This is a frame that is the main position in the animation. All animations have keyframes and will always consist of them. Thus, to animate sex through this art, we must change the position of the dick!

This doesn't seem like a big change, but now we have a full-fledged keyframe. What to do next is to create the next keyframe. Since we're animating sex, it would logically be in this position:

And with two keyframes, we ALREADY have a simple animation:

But what to do next? Well, some animators stop there! Yes, I've seen some animators who didn't improve their animations much after adding keyframes. But it doesn't look very good, does it? So next we start adding intermediate frame! A intermediate frame is a frame that is created between keyframes to improve the look of the animation.

And how many intermediate frame are needed? It depends entirely on the animator and the target animation. For example, I'll create a dynamic sex animation where the movement is fast and strong, it only needs 2 frames around the keyframes:

As you can see, the animation looks much better! Of course, this is far from a perfect animation and to bring it to the final form you need to work for quite a long time. For example, you need to change the head animation, add variations like slow sex, etc. But for devlog I'll leave it like this, just adding a simple color on top:

Thus we created a simple loop animation with 6 frames, where 2 are keyframes, and 4 are intermediate frames that are around the key frames. 
And this is just a simple animation with a fairly clear movement, since the dick moves from left to right, and the girl only reacts to this in a very light and clear pose. Of course, there are always more complicated cases when to convey the movement you need to change the base art several times, and sometimes even change the concept of the animation, due to the limits of pixel art (for example, very small pixel art does not allow you to draw a blowjob correctly!). But I will write about these limits in another devlog.