Animating Items
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Hello Magic Writer fans! So this week I have been working mainly on animating the objects that the wizard throws. We had discussed whether or not to have animated objects. The thought process being that we would lose out on more objects in favor of more polished ones. I had long been an advocate for having animated objects as this would make the game look and feel a lot better in my opinion. I agree that having a big library of items may be better for avoiding repetitive gameplay, but since this project is more of a learning experience I think practicing animation is important. After the presentation that I held last friday 20/2 we got feedback that animations would be better than more items, the group agreed and I started working on them. I brought different ideas I had drawn to a meeting and we agreed upon one of the ideas. We will only use three key frames for the objects, since they are moving so fast we feel that is enough.One when the objects rests in the bubble and in the wizards hands, one where the items flies through the air after being chucked and lastly one where it hits on of the monsters. A long with particle effects that the coders have implemented this will look good. My thoughts were to make the objects look stretched as if going fast when being thrown, since its comedy based it does not necessarily have to look right – it just have to look good. When they hit the monsters some items will break and fall asunder and objects with faces will have different expression to emphasize what is happening. Take for example the snowman that will get the classical X-eyes when he hits a monster. We have yet to test the animations in action, I am guessing that I will have to go back and change some of them if they do not look right. This is the first time for me doing this, so I would be surprised if no iterations would be necessary. I had to go back into all my sprite sheets and redo them for this, before we had perfect squares of 128*128 that we fit everything into. By doing this I did not have to provide and coordinates for the programmers. Now on the other hand I have to give the coordinates because some objects will be bigger when animated. I have been looking for a program that does this for me because right now it is quite tedious. Heres the new spreadsheet!
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