Project – Week 7
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Next week is the last week of the project, and it’s all about finishing and making things work. This week I’m going to talk about the death animation for the enemy character. I had some major problems with this animation earlier (but for the player character, see the Project – Week 5 post), but since then I’ve been thinking a lot about different ways to tackle the problem. When I worked on the player death animation I had a huge problem with conveying the feeling that the character is falling backwards and landing on the floor. The top-down perspective made it hard for me to visualize the action in my mind, so I just had to try out different things until I found something that at least captured the feeling of the character falling. This time I started out by animating a cylinder falling. I often forget it, but whenever there’s a difficult graphic problem to be solved, using simple shapes is often a good solution or at least a way to get closer to one. In this case it was really a good way for me to get an idea of the action and a base for the animation.
When I felt that I had gotten out the feeling that I wanted, I roughly painted over the cylinder with the colors used for the enemy, and tried to get out the general shapes and parts of the character.
(As usual, I used Valdemar’s tiles as reference in the background. This time I also used the player character sprite for comparison.) I think it’s a really good way to see if the action will work for the character, and to get an overall idea of how the final animation will look like. (It’s also easy to make changes and try out different solutions at this stage since you’re just working with shapes and color.) After this stage I worked on putting down details and finalizing the animation. I did do some changes to it while working though, such as removing a few frames since I thought that the animation maybe had too many for such a fast action. (And that it would look weird in the game.)
(Top: Getting the details down, Bottom: The current final animation) As I’m writing this blog post now, I feel that I should go back a few steps in the animation and add some of the frames that I took away.* Because now it feels a bit too short and that the action goes too fast…which makes it difficult to see what’s going on. I’m also thinking about changing the frame where the enemy takes a step forward and make it look more like it was in the “painted over” animation. This is a pretty good example of how one thought in the middle of the working process can change the outcome very drastically. That one thought that it maybe had too many frames had that much of an impact…I feel that I need to try and stick to the plan/sketch more in the future. I’m going to ask the programmers tomorrow if they can implement it in the game so that I can see how it works. I’m sure I’ll rework and add some frames to this one anyway, but it’s important that I can get an idea of how long time the action should take while playing the game so that it won’t look strange… (*F.I.Y: I always save the different stages of my work in different .psd files so that I always can go back and change or edit things easily.) … Regarding the player character death animation, I talked to Max in my group about alternative solutions that we could do, and we thought about maybe changing the screen when the player loses instead of showing a death animation and dead sprite in the game. Because for the enemies, a death animation and dead sprite are really important to have in the game since they’ll still be in it after they’ve died. But for the player the game is over immediately when it happens, so it would maybe be a better idea to have the death animation be a transition to the lose screen instead of showing it in the game level. It’s something I’ll have to discuss with the other team members, but if it’s going to be too difficult to implement or get done, I’ll just make a similar animation like this for the player character. We’ve already had some problems with implementing the different character animations in the game, so we better not try and complicate things more this last week!  |
