Inchworm Animation

A ton of potential.

By Daavpuke, Posted 04 May 2012

Inchworm Animation isn’t a game; it’s a design tool. In fact, it’s an impressive and complex title. Still, that complexity doesn’t always pay off and in some cases even hurts this download release.

The interface of Inchworm might be intimidating to newcomers with its many buttons and options. Even after the extensive tutorials detail its basic elements, there will still be a whole bunch of possibilities untapped. It’s possible to dig even further into documentation; however nothing is quite as handy as toying around on the canvas itself. The extensive glossary of features just might end up confusing players more anyway.

Inchworm Animation - NoobFeed Review

A first small grievance will pop up rather soon as Inchworm is dead set on having a sound effect for every little thing; some chosen better than others. The cacophony of sounds make it that much harder to concentrate, so be prepared to turn the sound off as a whole. This could’ve used some subtler implementations than for instance the alien noises made when choosing a brush size.

After a brief learning period, it will be time to create some art pieces. Here it immediately becomes apparent just how elaborate Inchworm can be. The palette on the right alone displays several ways just to pick a color. Topping that, most options also have additional uses within. It would be hard to detail everything, but some key points are brushes that adapt their width to speed, incredibly detailed zooming on the fly, a large color bank, simple shape creation and its foremost trait: animations.

Inchworm allows making small or more elaborate animations, by simply adding and managing cells and frames. By using an ‘onion’ skin method, players can see past frames, which helps accommodate the process. This, together with the ability to paste selections makes simple animations easy, but it doesn’t stop there. This design tool even goes as far as recording videos in several ways and allows players to edit frames as the clip plays. For most this won’t result in much more than a few simple lines dancing around to a video, but the potential of this is rather impressive.

Lest it be redundant, Inchworm boasts a ton of options that could potentially let the creativity skyrocket. Still, all these buttons and tricks don’t necessarily all end up being the expansive wonders they are. Don’t be mistaken, this design tool is in many ways a competitor for tried and true PC tools and that for a mere DS game is a feat of sheer power. It’s just that the small interface can sometimes lead to some issues.

Inchworm Animation - NoobFeed Review

The biggest problem is the Undo option, which only removes the very last move, with no history cycle. Since double tapping or just briefly losing touch of the screen for a second is fairly common, this grievance might cause tons of unnecessary busywork that could’ve been avoided. More so, since top buttons are packed together, accidently missing the over/underdraw and double tapping the clear button will indefinitely destroy the artwork. Why any design tool wouldn’t allow editing the history to some extend is baffling.

Another lesser implementation is the controls, which aren’t adapted to their full potential, leaving a lot of work to be done through the screen. It’s possible to slightly adapt buttons in the settings, but even here it will remain too limited to really keep the focus on the canvas at all times; requiring some needless fidgeting.

Luckily, for these few irking missteps Inchworm Animation boasts a ton of features as an expansive design tool, rivaling its bigger Photoshop-like peers. Hell, not even all of those allow for such a facilitating extent of video and animation capabilities. It might not be the most accessible title though, with a ton of knowledge to be acquired. Perhaps it might suit intermediate designers best, but given some good will, it could also help newcomers progress with leaps and bounds towards the designing culture. There is definitely a ton of potential to be found within.

Daav Valentaten, NoobFeed. (@Daavpuke)