I used to make animations with https://pivotanimator.net/ a lot as a kid, trying to make fight scenes like these. A sort of related thing is ToriBash, which is kind of a multiplayer 3D animation game where you fight each other by making decisions on which muscles to contract at each time interval.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".
if you liked toribash, also check out Your Only Move Is Hustle (or YOMI hustle) which is similarly 'turn based' but in 2d. Closest thing I've found to playable Xiao Xiao.
Toribash is awesome! I last checked it a year ago but it was still alive then [1]. Worth checking out still. People who were great at it back in the day were legitimately doing dark arts with the tools the game came with. I wonder if we'll have an era of appreciation and rediscovery for pre-AI software.
Yep, had Pivot on a disk. Countless hours lost making my own sprites, and I remember the joy of downloading other peoples sprites that were actually good
I remember spending hours and hours on pivot and forums like droidz.org which used to host animations, models, and forums. I even remember learning about "easing" and different "levels" of animation and collabs as showcased on darkdemon.org[1]
I still have a bunch of .piv files on a CD backup I burned on my PC right before I switched to an iMac G5 in the summer of 2007. I should fire Pivot again and reminisce. If I recall correctly, they were absolutely crude and incredibly poorly done.
Loved this stuff so much. I miss my summers off from school, where I would never think of a day gone as time "spent".