Project “Haunted Light” 2014-03-06 Pick-axe hack animation

One more week has flown by so fast and it’s time for yet another blog post. For this week’s sprint I’ve been working on the hacking with a pick-axe animation for the player. We in group 5 decided early on to keep the digging mechanic that the original game concept of “Bloody Badgers” had. Although in “Bloody Badgers” digging was the core mechanic, we decided for it to not play that big of a role in our game. We really wanted to play on the feeling of helplessness, fear and panic.  And when you give the player some sort of weapon, you kind of lose some of that.

During these past few weeks I’ve been mostly focused on doing animations for the player character. And since I was a complete beginner at that time, of course I made some mistakes that I now have learned from. So when going about making the hacking animation for the player I knew I should start with a sketch animation for the moving arm first.

So the first thing I did was to sketch out the key frames for the arm. One frame of the arm positioned at the furthest back of the pose, and one frame with the arm stretched out. I added a blue line to the sketch to act as the pick-axe so I could get the positioning of it correct.

Here is the two frame sketch animation I made.

As you can see this animation is very jerky and simple. You can get the idea of the action of the character, but I wanted it to feel more fluent. So I added another frame in-between, one very close to the first frame, to make it look like the action has more weight to it when picking up the pick-axe. I also added the head of the pick-axe to see how it would angle through the animation.

Here is the new three frame hacking animation sketch.

At this point I was happy with the sketch animation. Since it is an action type of sketch I decided not to add more frames to it. The sketch I made gets the point across and looks fairly smooth. If I added more frames I might have ended up with an animation that takes too long to play each time it’s activated and that would most likely disturb the flow of the gameplay.

So the next step for my animation was to flesh it out. 

I still have to clean off the edges and do the pick-axe in black and white but other than that I think it will work for the game.