Week 7

This week I am going to present my work on the animations for the power ups of the game, or rather the effect of an activated power up. In the game “Aggressive Bystander” there will be two different kinds of power ups, one that increases the player’s speed of movement, which is called “blue cow”. And another one called “happy pill”, which drastically decreases the pump-meter, now for those of you who are unfamiliar with the game design the pump-meter is a sort of HP bar that the player needs to keep balanced in order to survive.

In general when creating the graphics for this game, the main focus has been to be as obvious as possible in the design of the feedback the player is given. Being an arcade game that is viewed top down, there is not a lot of room to explain the game features, such as these power ups. So my thought behind these effects are that the player will try them out for the first time out of curiosity and the second time with the intended purpose.

I think this one is pretty obvious, it is basically your run of the mill fireball! The power up is called “blue cow”, which is quite the apparent reference to a certain energy drink… due to the name I made the flames blue, going towards scolding white. It is really not that advanced, I had a blowtorch in mind when choosing the colors. I did not strive for a realistic approach when considering the animation of the flames, but wanted it to feel plausible within the frames of the rest of the graphics in the game. I wanted to give a sort of liquid feeling to the flames, so that they would roll of the fireball, and in that way add to the feeling of the increasing speed.

This is the happy pill effect.

The thing that worried me about this one is that I did not want to give too much of a drug vibe with the animation. The fact that it is called happy pill is vibe enough! So I decided to keep it as simple as possible, and go with a smiley. I chose the smiley because of the clarity of it, it is something most people associate with something happy in general, and it gets the job done in the fastest way possibly.

I chose to put both of these sprites as something the programmers could summon just beneath the player sprite with the same dimensions, so as to spare them as much work as possible.

That is all I have to say this week! Thanks for reading!