Alright, so let me tell you about this little thing I worked on, this “pokeball caught” idea. It wasn’t for anything big, really. I was just kicking back one afternoon, feeling a bit bored, and remembered how much I loved those old Pokémon games. You know, the simple joy of chucking a ball and seeing if you caught something. So, I thought, why not try and make a tiny animation of that? Just for kicks.
So, the first thing I did was grab my old tablet. Nothing fancy, just a basic drawing tablet I use for doodles. I wasn’t aiming for some Hollywood-level stuff, just something that looked, well, like a Pokeball catching a Pokémon. I figured I’d need a few key pieces: the Pokeball itself, some kind_of critter, and then the actual catching sequence. Easy, right? Well, that’s what I thought.
I started by sketching out the Pokeball. Classic red and white. Took a few tries to get the circle looking like a circle and not an egg, you know how it is. Then, for the Pokémon, I didn’t want to get bogged down drawing something super complicated like a Charizard. Nah, I went for something simple, almost like a blob with eyes. Less hassle. The main thing was to show it getting zapped into the ball.
Then came the tricky part: the actual animation frames. I broke it down in my head:
- Pokeball flies onto the screen.
- It pops open.
- Some kind of light or energy beam shoots out and hits the blob-critter.
- The critter gets sucked into the ball.
- Ball slams shut.
- Then the classic wobble, wobble, wobble… click!
- And maybe some little stars to show it’s a done deal.
Man, doing it frame-by-frame was something else. I started with the ball flying in. That was okay. Opening it up, also not too bad. The energy beam, I just drew some shaky lines. But getting that “sucked in” effect for the critter? That took some head-scratching. I ended up just making the critter smaller and smaller each frame, kind of pulling it towards the ball. Looked a bit janky at first, not gonna lie.
The real pain was the wobble. How many wobbles? How fast? Too little and it looks weak, too much and it’s just silly. I must have redrawn those wobble frames like ten times. My hand was cramping up. And then making sure the “click” felt satisfying, even without sound. I added a little visual ‘pop’ when it finally settled.
After a good few hours of drawing, erasing, redrawing, and then stringing all the frames together in some basic animation software I had lying around, I finally had something. It was short, maybe like 5 seconds long. The blob-critter gets zapped, sucked in, the ball does its shaky dance, and then, boom, those little confirmation stars pop up. It wasn’t perfect, far from it. Some parts were a bit choppy, the timing could probably still be better.
But you know what? It worked. It actually looked like a Pokeball catching something. For a little afternoon project born out of boredom, I was pretty chuffed with it. It’s funny how much effort goes into even the simplest little animations. Made me appreciate the pros a lot more. I learned that even a simple idea takes a surprising amount of patience, especially when you’re doing it all by hand, frame by painstaking frame. Next time, if I ever do something like this again, I’ll probably try to find some shortcuts or better tools for the repetitive stuff. But for now, my little “pokeball caught” animation is a thing, and that’s pretty cool.
