Mole-directions and digging-animation

In the fifth week of development, me and the team prepare ourselves for the alpha presentation on friday.

During friday last week, I was finaly done with the mole sprite ones and for all. Here’s his final look.

I finished fixing his left arm and some minor parts of his body. Now he looks like a fully fletched character.

After friday, during the weekend, I spent the time in my home on the mainland and this was really lucky of me because during saturday all of Gotland had an gigantic power outage for several hours. If I would’ve still been on the island at that time, I would’ve not been able to finish all the directions in time.

A total of eight directions was needed in order to make the mole look like an isometric charcter. And here’s how they turned out. 

It was much easier for me to the the directions, because now that I’m finshied with the first sprite which presents his final look, I could just free transform parts of his body to which direction I want. I can also dublicate his body and use transform to turn him horizontal. However, I still needed to do four new sprites of the mole.I got help from my mom and got some suggestions from the team to improve some of the directions. I also used a elephant souvenir from India as, I think, a perspective tool of sorts. This really helped to do the front and back of the mole (the two sprites on the top-left). I finished drawing all the directions on sunday, and everyone in the team were very pleased.

This week, I got the assignment of doing a digging animation for the mole, when he digs into the ground. The game designer in the team was assigned to paint walkcycles and do the walking-animations to the mole, while I do the digging animations.

This work required some imagination with accurate free-transforming skills. I wanted the mole to jump in the air and then fall into the ground. When he touches the ground, he starts to dig it in the air. When he does that, brown earthpieces erupts from the position he digs on, and he slowly burris deeper into ground until he finaly disappears. I haven’t done that part yet, but I’m atleast done on the jumping part of the animation.

For now, I’ve done 10 frames for the animation. I don’t know how much I’ll need to do for it, but I need quite a lot for it to look good and run smoothly. I think I’ll aim for… between 15-20 frames. And each frame will run on 0.01 seconds, I.e. no delay.

And this is how it turned out.

This needs some imrpovement, but I think I might avoid drawing more jumping frames, because the mole-animation will go faster than the preview-gif above. After I’ve finished this animation, I’ll also need to do an animation whne the mole digs out of the ground. I hope I’ll finish the first animation during next week. The team depends on it.

Well, I’ll see you next week. 

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