I love those drawn looking animation videos for games like
The Burdens of Shaohao https://g.co/kgs/419Tq1 but are there any video game examples where those tools would be beneficial? My video game knowledge is not wide enough. Blender I can definitely see.
The amount of hand-drawn animation that went into Cuphead is a marvel.
There a bunch of really interesting examples just using Ubisoft's UbiArt framework such as Rayman Legends, Child of Light, and Valiant Hearts.
Speaking of Ubisoft and open source, Ubisoft originally announced UbiArt as an engine/framework intended to be open sourced. It's a shame that Ubisoft never followed up on that promise.
Supposedly it hasn't been used for a game since 2015 because it was "hard to use", but that seems more of a reason to open source it, perhaps to see if community interest could help where internal-only work struggled. A lot of open source starts hard to use and takes a village to make it better. (Blender, also mentioned here, might just be a poster child of that, too.)
As far as I know it's still used for Just Dance series. It definitely was when I worked on JD2016 and I don't think the engine was changed after that. And yes, in my (personal) opinion UbiArt was extremely difficult to use compared to some other engines within Ubisoft nowadays.
And yes, speaking of Ubisoft and open source - Sharpmake is a build management solution used by a lot of projects within Ubisoft and it was open sourced some time ago. Worth having a look.
Having grown up during the heyday of (good and terrible) flash games I can't stand the kind of vector art style that games like Hollow Knight have - it looks unprofessional to me, to the point where I'd rather play a worse game with pixel art.
I know Hollow Knight is fantastic, but it reminds my brain far too much of amateurish flash games.
