The Morker

Originally we planned to have two types of ranged enemies in our game. The first, labeled “the Workers” were supposed to stand faced against the wall, not noticing the player until they were attacked. When this happens, they would swarm the player and try to shoot her down. The second type of enemy was to be a flying moth character, that would fly around in random patterns, making him a difficult target, while at the same time firing down at the player. These two types of enemies were lately merged into what our programmers have given the name “Morker”.

This caused me some pain, since I was pretty much done with the design for both the worker and moth, and now I had to somehow merge them. The workers were supposed to be small and come in great numbers, while the moth was more of a special unit, almost like a mini-boss. We had not really came to conclusion on how the new “Morker” was supposed to behave either, so I was ultimately delayed with the animation.

At last, we actually decided to go for the original moth design, since we apparently kept most of the traits from the moth, while getting rid of most of the worker traits.

When animating the moth attack animation, I divided it into different segments, unlike the previous animations where I animated the entire body as a whole. The overall result was not as great as I had hoped for. Some of the individual parts looked great on their own, such as the legs and face, however, there was a lack of harmony between the different parts. I think what caused this was the fact that the Tommy gun moves at a different speed than the rest of the character. The area where the Tommy gun is located on the character also becomes mess due to that there is so much happening at the same place, not to mention the jerky animation.

This has not been my most successful animation thus far. The result in my opinion, have not been close to as good as previous animations. However, it is not terrible. In fact, I think it has a high enough quality to not stand out and break the harmony of the overall game. In any case, I feel like I can move on to the next task without feeling bad, and thankfully, the rest of the group seem to agree.