Game development process week 5
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Last week I talked about how I thought when I was creating the sprite for the ranged enemy and some images from the development process. This week I have been working on the sprite for the astronaut which is the main character for the game. At the beginning we used an image from the concept just to get a picture of how large everything would be in the game and to have something nicer than a black square for a place-holder.
The first iteration of the astronaut I made to fill out the square picture as much as possible because the picture was supposed to be the hitbox for the character. The problem with this was that the rifle the astronaut is supposed to wield had to be very short in order to get the picture as small as possible around the astronaut. The second thing I tried to fix with this small boxy character was that in order to make it easy for the programmers I tried to make the astronaut hold the weapon in the middle of his body because when the bullet spawned it spawned from the center of the image.
This solution with this boxy astronaut worked, but it did not look very well. In the playtesting that we had in the beginning of this week many people said it looked like the astronaut held a blowgun to his mouth, through a spacesuit. Obviously this is not a desirable solution and that is why I have started working on a new variant of the astronaut. In this new iteration I have skipped to try and make the player fill out the entire picture and instead we have decided that the programmers will create a separate hitbox on top of the image in the game. This gives me a lot more freedom in designing the astronaut and it makes the character look more correct in way of posture.
This is the second iteration of the astronaut and as you can see this looks way better than the first iteration. But the problem here is that when you wield a weapon you don’t hold it straight forward but rather turn your upper body so that the weapon is closer to your body. And the reason you hold a weapon like this is because the left arm of your body is not as long as the astronauts left arm is right now. I turned the body of the astronaut quickly in photoshop and ended up with this result.
This looks correct and representative of how a person would hold a weapon and the body looks correct. But this variant has yet another major flaw that makes it unusable. Right now the weapon is pointing forward but the thrusters on the jetpack is completely skew. So this would not work in the real world. That is as far as I have made it in the process so far but hopefully I will find a solution until the alpha demonstration on friday. Tagged: astronaut, game project, iteration, problem solving, Weapon  |
