How Rush Royale creates animated emojis

Learn how the Rush Royale team creates animated in-game emojis to express emotions during battles.

Let’s talk about expressing ourselves during the game. In Rush Royale, our genre-defining tower defense game, we use in-game animated emojis, and it’s a huge part of our project. 

Hello! I’m Vitaly Ozornov, Lead 2D Artist, Animator, and Effects Specialist at MY.GAMES. I’ll guide you through our animation process — from ideation to execution. 

The emoji journey

Players use emojis during their intense tower battles to express their emotions. Originally, our emojis were pretty simple: joy, anger, laughter.

But we’ve come a long way. Now, our emojis are much more alive and elaborated, since we wanted them to convey emotions during PvP and PvE battles and also present something cool to the players. 

💡Our unspoken rule is to make the emojis brief yet deeply meaningful — we don’t want to distract the players too much during the game. 

To make the characters more alive and dynamic, we deliberately exaggerate all movements. Anticipation, squash and stretch, asynchrony of movements — we apply all 12 basic principles of animation.

Besides the simple emotions, we like to insert a little story into our animations. For instance, in an Inquisitor emoji, players can finally see who is hiding under the helmet.

Emoji: from idea to implementation

Let’s go over our workflow step by step!

1. An artist receives a task to create an emoji. The brief can include a character description (archer, demon hunter, “electromagician”), or a particular theme (summer, New Year, Halloween).
2. The artist creates a couple of sketches and outlines basic ideas.

1. The animator and artist choose one sketch for the final render. We work on the animation ideas together. Here, for instance, we decided that Shaman whistles for the dog, and the dog pushes him out of the frame:

1. The animator receives a storyboard with movements and individual character fragments:

1. We upload all the elements to the project and create a UI-prefab for the emoji. We also include standard elements like the white bubble and the golden frame — these are used in all our animations. 

1. The animator creates two animations that are essential duplicates: Emoji_Hunter_UI is an emoji animation in the interface and Emoji_Hunter is the emoji we show in battle. 

1. We animate the bubble's appearance and merge it with character animation to give emojis a dynamic and lively feel, creating an illusion of a small world within the game.

1. Next, we outline the main animation points: we want our hunter to blow the horn, so he brings the horn to his lips, draws air, and blows:

1. We need more details to make it interesting.  Let’s add micromovements in his head, mustache, and brows:

1. Much better, but let’s refine it even more. We add the movement of the head and the horn and puff up the cheeks. And here’s the final result!

And that’s that! This is our pipeline for all our emojis. Some are more difficult, others are easier, but they all play a part in making the in-game content more lively.