Player Avatar – Walk animation
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Work on building a game is progressing, and last week I wrote about the test animation I did for the player avatar. Now, before I go into detail about my process while doing the first attempt at a proper animation, let’s do a quick run-through of what the game is really about. My group, also known as Team 1, are working on the game “The Fancy Mansion Heist” (working title), which is about a burglar breaking into the luxurious mansion of Mr. Otto von Fancy. The burglar is a scruffy hoodlum of indeterminate gender, and Otto is a wealthy elderly man who is trying to stop you from stealing his valuables. As I’m the one responsible for animating both the burglar and Otto von Fancy, I have had to try ways to shorten the time spent working on every frame of the individual animations. So I decided to try something I personally don’t enjoy, and draw out perfectly even lines for every body part of the burglar on separate layers in my art program of choice, Paint Tool SAI. This was to simplify copy-pasting, which would only require small edits to the limbs for each frame once I had the main parts drawn out. After spending a few hours adapting the different layers to make 14 frame drawings for the right-side walk animation, I had something which looked like this:
This .gif shows how the “bare bones” of the animation looks like, so I could see if the lines matched up well enough to proceed to colouring it in. And as I deemed the mistakes small enough to never be noticed in the actual game, where the burglar will be only a fourth as big as this example .gif, I went on to doing a minor edit line-wise and quickly filling in the flat colours. Once this was done, my animation became something which we could put into our game prototype, to test both speed and graphic elements:
For this .gif, I chose to slow down the animation speed a bit, to show my group how quickly I expected the burglar to walk in-game. I assembled a sprite sheet with the 14 frames which makes up the animation, and we implemented it into our prototype. Unfortunately, there was an issue I had overlooked in my process. The burglar did neither stand out against the environment in the way we have strived for, nor match anything design-wise to the rest of the game:
At this point, all it creates is a boring and bland spot on the screen. So how will I fix this error? Well, since so far this was the only “finished” animation, there won’t be too many hours lost. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ll have to redo the lines in a manner I’m more familiar with, which is smooth lines with variation in thickness. I will also add simple shading, to give depth cues and create a less flat look for the burglar among the rest of the mansion objects and environments. I will keep the arms on separate layers, and eventually make individual sprite sheets for those, as the player avatar will be carrying a multitude of objects, and the arms has to be adapted accordingly. Other than this, I’ve learned more of what my weaknesses and strengths are when it comes to graphics due to working on this particular animation. So even though the hours spent on it turned out to be for nothing, I’ve gained important insight, which will hopefully aid me in the coming weeks of building “The Fancy Mansion Heist”. /Addis  |
