Redesigning the wizard
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This week’s priority has been redesigning the wizard, the playable character of our game. The wizards job is to spawn items and throw them at the monsters in order to keep them away from the beach visitors. We already had a wizard with almost finished animations done for the game but there were some problems. Our game have had some issues with the perspective. When I first did the mockup of the game screen in Photoshop it looked quite good. But when we later implemented the sprites for the enemies, wizard and background elements into the actual game we noticed something funky. I had painted the enemies and the wizard in different perspectives. This led to it looking like the monsters were coming down a wall in front of the wizard. First, we tried scaling the monsters from small to bigger to create an illusion of perspective. This did not work very well since it is not an actual perspective. We then discussed creating a more advanced perspective system where we would have a vanishing point outside the screen, but after some thinking we realized this would be to late to implement. Our last resort was to redo the wizard into a more top down perspective. While this led to a more classical arcade looking game it worked a lot better and will probably lead to a more polished game. When designing the wizard I kept it quite close to the original concept. It felt suitable for the setting so I saw no reason the make any big changes. Since the game is supposed to be fast paced and comical it felt fitting to have a lot of one frame key poses. The biggest challenge when designing the different animations was to keep the perspective the same. A body is, for me, quite difficult to paint in a half top down perspective, but a circle is quite easy. Luckily, the hat of the wizard can be designed as a circle, so I used that to strengthen the perspective. When creating the sprites, I started by making a sketch for the wizard in an idle state. I then put a clean line above this, and lastly a layer of color underneath the clean line. I then used this as a template for the rest of the sprites. I painted all the sprites beside each other to be able to pick colors and use the finished sprites as references for the rest. For some, I just edited existing sprites when creating a new one, and some times I did it from scratch. Overall, I am quite happy with the result. It was a fun artifact to work on since each sprite did not take too long and it was refreshing starting on a new pose. I tried creating comical and expressive poses, which is challenging, but also very much fun.  |
