The Blog, a Resurrection!

New times and new blog-posts!
Recently in the course Game Development – Introduction my group began developing a game from a concept created by another group of student. The concept was called Possession, a Shooter style game inspired by east-Asian lore.

As a part of the course we are supposed to take an artefact for the game that we have worked on or completed and describe our work process. The one I have chosen for this blog post is the death animation of a fire spirit.

This particular animation was the longest (a mind-boggling 7 frames) and probably most impressive out of the ones I’ve made so far, but didn’t really take much longer. In fact, it took less time to make than the idle animation.
I believe that it was a bit faster because I had already defined what the fire spirit would look like and attempted a few different approaches to animating movement.

What I wanted with this animation was to have the fire spirit break apart and disperse, almost like when you blow out a candle. But bigger. This would make the enemy conveniently disappear as well as look rather impressive.

But how, I know you ask, did you create this chef d’œuvre? (googling synonyms like a boss)
Fist I took one of the finished sprites from the fire spirit’s fire animation as a base and started sketching, very roughly mind you, on a few layers above it trying to get a base down. Using the rather annoying Timeline function I occasionally (and by that I mean pretty much after any kind of alteration, big or small) played the rough sketching to see if it worked without too much “hopping” or inconsistencies between frames.

Once I was happy with the rough I started filling in the lineart, mostly going after the sketch, but altering it as needed to fit the style of the spirit.
Then when I was happy with that as well, I added the color. First a base, then two different lows and one lighter color. Again, playing the animation and jumping between frames plenty to make sure that everything I add works smoothly between frames.

And that was the basic process for creating the death animation. Once done I inserted these new frames into the fire spirits sprite-sheet, making sure that they were properly aligned and that they maintained their transparency all around.
I do occasionally use a white brush instead of using the eraser when fixing outlines and such, a bad habit when transparency is important, so double checking that is a must.

I suspect that I will be making more posts about animations like this, so I’ll see if I can’t manage a process picture at some point. Or a gif. A process gif. Anyway, enjoy this fine animation of death!

4 Idle Frames
7 Death Frames
11 Awesome Frames