Monsters
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This week I have mainly worked on the enemies of our game, the sea monsters. Up until now we have used the same sprite for all the monsters, but with different colored overlay. As I mentioned in my previous post, our monsters have weaknesses to different type of item properties. The items possess either one of these properties; hot, cold, dead or alive. And the monsters are ice, lava, undead and holy. We felt that we wanted to make the differences clearer between the monsters for the upcoming alpha presentation. When designing the monsters my main focus was to make them as distinguishable as possible without straying from our graphical profile, while also making it clear which property it was weak against. This was primarily done with different colors. The color schemes for the different monsters came quite naturally because of their type, for example red and yellow for the lava monster. Varying patterns were also used to create a bigger diversity, like stripes, spots etc. Lastly, the animations for the monsters will also be unique, although this is not fully implemented yet. Since the monsters will be emerging from the water when reaching the beach we faced a challenge regarding the animation for the emerging parts. First we thought about just creating an animation for the whole monster where the “feet” just appear after a while, but that became a problem when the monsters get knocked back, which would result in the feet appearing too early. What we got in the end was a monster divided into different parts, or sprites. The sprite sheet for each monster consists of the feet, the lower body, the foam around the monster, and lastly the head. These were later in code stacked on top of each other to create a whole monster. This allowed the programmers to fade the foam and feet to make the monster appear to emerge from the water at a preset location. The feet of the monster are also coded to stretch back and forth which works as a walk animation. Overall I am quite satisfied with how the monsters turned out. I feel they are easy to distinguish and represent each others types. The monster to the left though is the first monster I created for the game back when we did not have different monsters and weaknesses, but for now, because of limited time, it represents the holy monster. This will be fixed for the beta though.  |
