Monster animations
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It is starting to get close to the Beta and that is therefore what we have decided to focus on this week. The programmers are focusing on implementing power ups, sounds and the wave system. The artists are working hard to get the graphical parts ready to complement the programming. My part in this is to create an alternate background to represent the freeze power up and making some animations for the enemies. In this post I will focus on the animations, which you can see below.
These animations are supposed to loop while the monster is moving down the screen. Since the monsters are split up in several sprites and then stacked on top of each other, as mentioned in a previous post, the programmers can animate the bottom parts, AKA the feet, and I only had to animate the top parts. This also enables the feet to seamlessly move while another animation plays on top, like when the monster knocks the wizard to another lane while still moving. The idea with these animations was mainly to make the monsters more interesting, but also to make them easier to associate with its type. For example it has to be clearer that the alive monster is in fact weak against dead items. This was something that was brought up as critique during the alpha presentation and we agree this would be good to think about. When creating the animations I tried to keep them consistent with the rest of the game. Since we have quite a lot of one frame animations for both the monsters and the wizard, I felt a super smooth animation would not quite fit. Therefore I decided to go with four frames at 0.1 seconds per animation. This limit was foremost implemented to create a consistency between the monsters but also to get the kind of animation that would be suitable in a game like this. In some cases four frames worked really well, but in others it fell a little short and made the animation very boring. Overall I am not that happy with the results. It was quite difficult to create animations that are easily identified with a type of monster that does not actually exist. In some cases I was left without an idea which lead to an animations that only made the monster a bit more interesting to look at but not at all more easy to identify as a specific type. I will talk to my group for input and try to iterate on these animations as soon as possible.  |
