Frozen ocean
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This week we have once again rushed towards the beta presentation to try to get as much stuff as possible into the game. Last Monday we had play testing and as before it is still not clear which items do more damage to certain monster types. This is our biggest problem at the moment and we have not yet found a good solution, therefore I hope to get back to this in a later post. In this one I will focus on the design and animation for the freeze power up. Up until now we have only had a single frame for this feature, which was a frozen ocean that was swapped for the background when the power up was activated. First of all, the sprite for the frozen ocean was quite poorly made and second, I felt the power up was in need of an animation. Here is the old sprite for the frozen ocean.
I have at several occasions tried making the sprite for the frozen ocean, without much success. After all the hours I have spent on this one sprite, I have come to the conclusion that painting a frozen ocean in top down view is quite challenging, especially for our purpose. Since the monsters might be anywhere on the level when the ice is applied there cannot be too big cracks or weird stuff happening on the ice because then it might look weird when a monster gets frozen on top of it. I looked at references for the ice and tried a lot of different styles like, bubbly, cracked and smooth ice but none of these felt especially fitting. After a lot of trying the finished version is quite smooth but with some cracks in it, because that worked best with monsters on it, and felt fitting enough with the graphical style of the normal background. When it comes to the animation the technical part was not that advanced. I made a line of spikes that creates a clearer difference between the ice and the normal background when the ice is spread across the ocean. This line was simply moved for each frame and then I cut the ice layer to match the line of spikes. Since everything else in the game is quite fast paced, the power up should not slow the game down either, therefore three quick frames was enough. This feature of the game is not one I am super happy with. I do not feel the sprite represents ice in the best way possible, but this is the best I could muster up. The animation can be viewed below.
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