Player Avatar Animations
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Alright! Another Thursday, another game development post. A quick recap: The game my group and I are working on is called The Fancy Mansion Heist, and it’s about a burglar breaking into the luxurious mansion of Mr. Otto von Fancy, a trigger happy elderly man. Your objective is to steal as many valuables as you can in the shortest amount of time possible, without being discovered by Otto, who will shoot you upon sight. Now, my main task have been to animate the burglar and Mr. Otto von Fancy. Various setbacks and revisions have eaten away a lot at my time, and as such I’ve yet to begin animating Otto. But here are my concepts of the blunderbuss-toting gentleman in question:
A tired man still wearing his bed clothes after rushing out of bed the second he was awoken by the sounds the burglar makes. Only had the time to grab his blunderbuss and slip on his monocle. I stayed close to the previous group’s concept art of Otto (aka: the ones who created the Fancy Mansion concept which we’re building our game from), and chose to simplify whatever details were there into something which could be easily animated. In his final animated shape, he’ll most likely be slightly more rounded and shorter, to fit the size of the burglar and environments better. Speaking of the burglar. I’ve gone through a few versions of them so far, trying to produce the best I can within the time frame we have. But as the Beta deadline is creeping up on us, and a nasty illness stole a week of my time, I’m forced to put the finer details to the side and just cram out as much as I can before next Wednesday, while still making it look good. I won’t talk about the previous versions of the burglar here, or why I’ve gone with the previous design choices I have. All that have been covered in previous blog posts, so feel free to take a peek at those for a more comprehensive look on my process over the past few weeks. For now, I’ll just mention where I am in terms of animation, and what needs to be done.
This is the “final” burglar side animation I showed to my team mates earlier today, which has been edited in terms of line thickness and depth indicating shading. A blinking eye has been added as well, which I personally felt didn’t quite work. This will be fixed by duplicating the 14 frames visible here into a 28 frame animation, and editing out the blinking from the second set of 14, to make the player avatar blink every other step instead. If this looks odd or still feels rushed, we will talk about further duplicating and editing frames, or leaving the blinking out entirely. It all boils down to a question of aesthetics vs. “how big can the animation sizes be”? Other edits which needs to be done, to ensure the character does not appear too flat against the environments they travel in, is to add more shading and highlights in a few select places. I whipped up a quick test example, just to have something visual to compare everything else with:
This finally gave the look we were after, where the burglar “popped out” enough, but did not make the environment appear flat in comparison. So now, I will edit the animations I have to feature the new shading and highlights, and proceed to finish the rest of them, including Mr Otto von Fancy’s animations, in the same style. It’s an around the clock work to finish everything up before the due date, but I’m positive we’ll make it, and have a pleasing product to show for our hard work these past weeks. /Addis  |
