I dont think it would betray aesthetic, as long as the change isn’t to significant. It just needs a change of one voxel to create a very authentic sad face. Here’s an example:
This looks more sad then the current sad animation in my opinion, since the face of hearthlings is way to neutral to really express sadness, even if you fiddle around with hands and the head position. At least I would add the sad face to the current sad walk to make it look authentic. 
Ah, but how to do this is not so simple.
Do we replace the head with new voxels?
Do we add a pair of “eyelid” bones which can translate around, but somewhat stick out of the face?
Do we add polygonal faces to create a voxel-like look?
And with many of these options, how do we get the face to update at the correct moment during the animation?
These are things we are looking into, but sadly aren’t simple answers.
On an aside, that sheep looks extremely cheery : ).
the sheep is happy, it is not affected by the sadness of the villagers 
it has food and safety ahahahah
Replacing the head with new voxel seems like it could lead to many polybugs, like hearthlings without a head when they want to change to sad-face and it would probably also lead to more performance issues when 30 hearthlings change the head all the time. That’s why I think I think an eyelid bone would be the best option. During neutral expression, the eyelid can disappear into the hearthlings head, so that the neutral face looks like it always does and the eye lid could be used to create multiple emotional faces without having to create whole voxel models that replace the neutral one.
In addition I think a hearthling that is sad should always have the sad face. This way it can be avoided that the emotional face animation needs to be triggered all the time, which could probably also reduce performance if like 30 hearthlings switch between sad/neutral every few seconds.
Add eyebrow shaped blocks and you can have a multitude of expressions.
Oh, oh, in my town, there will only be room for 100% skippy-happy hearthlings, even if it is a total on screen mess, because we demand ultimate efficiency.
I think the unhappiness should be more situational. This does makes it harder to tell at a glance if a hearthling is unhappy or in a neutral state, but I think that may be necessary.
Instead of “running sadly”, have the unhappy ones emote sadly (more than hearthlings normally emote) and take some time out of their day to just sit around and mope (assuming they aren’t being murdered at the time).
Inspiration spike!
yeah, but in an ‘if’ situation where we manage to finally get the scaling system working, these type of things can be done!
I gathered the more ‘emotional’ animations form the base game and added my own eye object and animated them
these were done by removing the faces eye voxels, and making two seperate objects for the eyes, and animating them with scale and a little rotation if needed(like the yawn) and a liittle bit of movement if needed
figured it’d be possible after seeing how Starbound handles the laughing emote with pixels (they’re just a straight line, but higher and stuff)
The eyes do add a lot of personality!
for further reference, i’d say you could look up Cozmo.
These look really good, they do give a lot more personality to the hearthling and they add more life to the heartlings (Especially the first one for me )
That’s what I’m talking about. Faces have the biggest impact on expressing emotions (obviously I guess) and keeping them neutral makes it really hard for the hearthlings to deliver their mood to the player. Animating hands and heads helps ofc, but it feels unnatural and kinda creepy. Your models feel so alive because of the animation and I think it perfectly fits into stonehearth. Really well done!
Oh wow! Thank you so much for doing this : ), its been something on my plate I need to do, but haven’t had time to : /. I will definitely use this as ammunition to my cause.
One little disclaimer of warning though, there is a general sentiment on the team against… how to say… abandoning the voxel aesthetic. So because these eyes scale across multiple voxels and rotate, the team’s general response has been that it doesn’t ‘feel right’. Frankly I disagree, but I do understand where they are coming from; and I do want to make sure we don’t lose that “special something” which stonehearth currently has. BUT - in my opinion, this totally stays within that style : ), and I’m going to flash it all over the office every chance I get until I get me some scale powers ; P.
Thank you again!
No problem! these aren’t that much to work, and i was taking a break from the TMC animations for a bit anyway (they’re fun, but complex enough to burn through stamina pretty fast)
i suppose it’s because of how it almost looks like it makes polygonal changes, it really does break the pixelated feel as soon as it starts to rotate like how the yawn does, but i think many of those rotations can be avoided (the yawn could just be a normal squished box, it’ll be weaker, bu it’ll look just as good)
(rough because i just rushed the render with my laptop)
another way would be to have them snap into other eyes by making them change in one frame
keeping that pixelated feel while applying scale and good emotion
That’s why I suggested that an eye-lid bone would probably be the best solution. It would be a compromise between “not-abandoning voxels” and “let faces express emotions”. Ofc for some animations an eye-lid bone wouldn’t be enough, but at least for happy/sad I can imagine it works and also for things like “wondering/thinking” (@Hyrule_Symbol animation as reference)
edit: Also, lets not forget that you could use @Hyrule_Symbol method with the transformable texture and still make it look like that only voxels are changed in color. So instead of using a fluent transformation like Hyrule_Symbol does, you could make it an instant animation. Like this:
Just imagine the eyes are just black textures that are just placed on top of the voxels and cover them and can be changed with other eye-textures. So if you want to let them express sadness, you just replace the ‘neutral eye’-texture with the ‘sad eye’-texture. In order to keep the voxel style, only parts of the texture should be changed that cover a whole voxel. Like in my example, the top left (left eye) and top right (right eye) parts of the textures are removed in the ‘sad eye’-texture and these parts are as big as a whole voxel. The player can’t see the difference and will think you just changed the color of a voxel there.
Sure eyes are great for expressions, but how often do you zoom in on a persons face in the game?
The animations are meant to be watched from the default game view which is up and at an angle.
I do wish they converted the “normal” run animation into a walk-animation with the same speed and then added “run” as a faster way of moving because the hearthlings are way to slow to play at X1 now.
Here is a zoomed out version:
I think this still makes a big difference. Also those expressions are just an indicator for players to see that they are unhappy. It’s not like the game needs to force that those expressions get recognized by the player. If the player wants to take a look, he can shift his attention on the faces of his hearthlings and will very likely see if they look happy or not. And if the player doesnt care, he will probably not recognize the faces when zoomed out. I think this would be good, cause it could be annoying if you constantly get confronted with the feelings of your hearthlings. That’s why many people are against the idea of happy/sad walks, since you will see hearthlings constantly jumping around, expressing their happiness. The a slight change in the emotion expression through the face is the better option then a whole body animation in my opinion.
I’d say they need different variations of these two animations
I’ll supply a screenshot of how I play the game… I’d never look into their faces unless they are selected. So MAYBE the portrait in the left corner should contain the “eye-animation” you are talking about.
Sounds good to me, though it would probably not be a problem giving both (the character itself and the protrait) the emotional expressions.
I like this a lot.
Emotive yet pixel-y!
Could animating something like this help?
