Project “Bloody Badgers” 2014-02-20 Running Animation

Time really does fly by. It’s Thursday once again, and Thursdays means new blog post. Since I’ve been having trouble with scheduling all my schoolwork this week there won’t be a whole lot of content for me to blog about. I did finish some, which I will talk about now, but sadly not as much as I had planned during this sprint. I will have to continue working with that during the rest of the week instead.

Amongst the things I had planned to do this week I did manage to create a running cycle for the player character. I extended the legs from my previous walking animation on both sides and added a little more length to the right arm on the contact poses of the animation.

Here is the walking- and running animation of the player character so you can see for yourselves. Mind them being in diffrent sizes.

Since a running animation often needs more frames to look smooth it will appear slower moving than the walking animation. That is something that our lead programmer of our group will have to look into to make it play faster.

Another thing I did during this sprint was that I darkened up the player. I realized how light my initial player character was against the dark and gloomy background of our game and it really bothered me. Since I was always working with a transparent background I didn’t see how well it would actually work with a dark background. What I’ve learned is that it is really helpful to have a mockup in handy of the background for your game so you can easily put whatever you are creating into the scene and see how well it works.

I’ve been also trying to find a good way to create flickering light on the character. Since the character is holding a living candle there will be more movement (flicker) than it would have been of a harsh and stale light, for example, from a flashlight. I think it would give a nice effect and service the feel of the game.

But of course if there is a flickering light, there also has to be flickering shadows. But the way I had organized and merged my layers in Photoshop, whereby all flats of the same colors aren’t on the same layers but scattered, made it so much more difficult for me. I made it so I just can’t simply tug and pull a layer where, for example, the shadow of the sleeping cap is to make it longer and bigger to give the illusion of stronger light. Instead I have to paint over it on every frame and that is just more time consuming. Once again a rookie mistake, one I won’t make again. When animating, make sure you plan ahead. You will be thankful you did later on when tweaking your animations.