Project – Week 3
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It’s the third week of the project and I continued working on character animation this week. One of the tasks I had to finish this week was to make an animation of the enemy character walking around with a flashlight. Since I had already done a walking animation for the enemy last week, I just copied that one and added a flashlight. To create the light from the flashlight was a different matter. There were many ways that you could do it graphically, but it had to match the games pixel style graphics. It also had to be slightly transparent farther away from the light source to give it the feeling of a real flashlight. I first made a bright yellow triangle and added a white outline to it. I then picked the eraser tool and changed it to a square pixel brush on low opacity. I then began erasing the bottom part of the light triangle, moving slowly upwards toward the flashlight. Somewhere in the middle of the light I stopped erasing, since making the opacity too low on the light could make it difficult to spot while playing the game. Lastly I added an overlay layer set on clipping mask above the light layer and began experimenting to find a good light color.
I had to edit the light a bit during the process, since it was a bit short in length. Depending on how it will look when it’s implemented in the game, I’ll maybe have to edit it more. It’s important that the length is correct since it plays an important part in the stealth mode of the game. The difficult level depends much on it since it will be easier or more difficult for the player to be spotted by the enemies if the light is too long or to short.
Something I thought of after have seen some of the other graphic artists’ blogs from last week was that I didn’t have any “progress pictures” in my last post. I didn’t actually save or take any progress screenshots for either of the sprites I made last week, but since there weren’t 400 words to say about this week’s artifact, I guess I could try and describe how they were made. I don’t have any images to show the process, but I’ll maybe be able to add some later if I have the time. Working with pixels is a bit like sculpting. I often start out by drawing shapes that represent the parts of the sprite that I’m going to make. For the enemy and player sprite I first researched different 2D games’ solutions on the top-down perspective problem that I mentioned in the last post, and decided to make a slightly tilted sprite in order to be able to show some slight details on the characters. So I drew out the main shapes, like a circle or a square for the head and the torso, and continued with the arms and the legs. I then moved around the parts a bit to see and work on the overall shape of the character. It’s a good way to try out and see if the legs, for example, would look better if they were made shorter, or if the character was too tilted. And after that I start to block out the sprite in grayscale, using different values for different parts of the character. It’s the main sculpting part of the process where I paint over the base that I’ve made and then define and render the sprite it by adding details and outline. Depending on the sprite it takes a different amount of time, and in many cases you can just create half a sprite and mirror it which saves a lot of time. This project has so far had symmetrical sprites and has made it a lot easier to create and animate than it would have been with asymmetrical sprites.  |
