Project – Week 6
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It’s the Beta for our game tomorrow, and it’s getting a bit stressful to get all things done. There’s still some animations that needs to be done on both the player and enemy character, and there have been a few things that haven’t gone as I expected during the project… which has taken a lot of time from me. I’m working a lot on the problems though, and luckily I’m doing pretty okay right now. Today I’m going to talk about the pick-up object animation, or pick-up evidence animation, which has gone through a lot of changes during the project. I began working on it shortly after I had finished my work on the player and enemy characters’ walk animation. There were many ways that I could choose to show the character picking up the object, but I had an idea that the character would put the evidence in his coat after he picked it up. I thought that it would be a nice touch that would add to the feeling of the player being desperate to pick up the evidence, so I did a test animation based on the “idle” sprite that’s part of the walk animation.
It ended up looking a bit like he’s swiping an object and putting it in his coat, but I thought that it maybe would work. I asked my fellow graphic artists Max and Valdemar for feedback, but they thought that a simpler approach would be better. I could see what they meant and began thinking about a solution, but soon after that I became busy with adjusting the other sprites because of the comments we had gotten during the first play testing and alpha presentation, and didn’t work on the object sprite for a while. I think it was good though, because during that time I got a better view on the game as a whole, and could see the graphic problems (that were and those that could happen) more easily. During the first part of the project we worked mostly on our own, but from that point I worked together with the other graphic artists and the programmers more, and things that were a bit unclear for me with the game became a lot clearer. I hadn’t really been that sure on how the evidence would be spread out in the level, or if it would be lying on desks or any of the other props… but now I knew that they’re lying on the floor which means that the character has to bow down and pick it up. I had actually done a new test animation shortly after I was done with the adjustments, but I didn’t think that it worked that well. Now it was more like he was reaching out his hand and leaning forward, which would have worked if the evidence had been on a desk or similar, but it wouldn’t work to pick something up from the floor.
So I had to think, how do I show someone in top-down perspective picking up an object from the floor? This was a bit of a challenge. I tried moving the character’s shoulders and head, and pushing one of his knees forward and the other backward, but it didn’t look convincing or good.
I felt a bit stranded for a while, but then I realized: the back! You have to show his back a little in order to show that he’s leaning forward or bowing down. I hadn’t thought that much about it at all, but it was basically all I had to do in order to make it look believable (or as believable as you can with pixel graphics). I felt a bit silly, but I’m glad that I found the solution as quick as I did this time. If only it would have been the same with last week’s animation problems…
So, this is what the current animation looks like, as usual I used one of Valdemar’s tiles as a reference and guide for the animation: The reason why I’m writing “current” animation instead of “final” is because it hasn’t been QA-ed by the other team members, and the fact that all or almost all animations that I’ve done have been adjusted slightly or a lot during this project… But still I think it’s pretty good that I have been able to adjust these animations, because it’s difficult and takes a lot of time to get it right on the first try, and this way I can polish them while still being able to work on other things for the project. It’s a bit bad that I lost a lot of time last week though with the animation that didn’t work out. I also worked a lot on a placeholder menu for the second play testing, a task I got/took on a pretty short notice, but we needed one so I don’t mind that much. I just hope that I’ll be able to fix the problems with last week’s animation so that I won’t lose more time than I already have…  |
