Even more animations
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So lately I have been working on reworking some animations for our game Fancy Mansion. What I have been trying to do is to make our walking animation more comical to fit our style or eventually get the comical aspect down in some other animations. The hard part of this task is to exaggerate some aspects of the movement and to translate it to our pixelated style. So far I haven’t been able to transition this exaggerated movement in a way that satisfies me. It ends up in either one of the to extreme points of the scale, it’s either too stale or it’s way too much.
I began by brainstorming some simple walking styles in order to get a feel for what it was I wanted to convey in my animations. What we wanted was a sort of tiptoeing sneak or in other ways sneaky walk. So the general theme I went with was that the hands and elbows were heightened and tense as to make it seem like the character was keeping his or her balance and at the same time seeming paranoid. At the same time I wanted the character to look as if he or she took careful steps, the walk we walk when we are trying to not wake someone up but it seems as if every step makes as much noise as an entire orchestra as the floor creaks under each step. That is the walk i want for our character, i want to convey a feeling of the anguish the character is feeling when he or she just cannot take a silent step.
This is the sketch that I went with as i feel that it conveys what I want the most out of all the sketches. From here i went ahead and planned out a walk cycle that I felt fit with the sketch.
This is the first draft of the walkcycle that I came up with. The top lines represent how the torso heaves up and down as the character takes a step, I went with this more rigid approach for that movement as i feel that smoothness doesn’t translate well to pixelated graphics the way I want to. The right and left arrows represent what leg is moving forward. Using this template I have gone through a couple of prototype animations, none of which I feel convey what I want. I am now trying to reimagine how to animate this movement in our graphic style which is something I should have had in mind from the beginning, had I kept these thing in mind this process would have been a lot less painful.  |
