Week 9: Finishing up! Also last obligatory blog post!
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Hello! This is the second to final week of our design projekt, and the game is nearly complete. There isn’t alot to do, and most of it was covered by our lead artist, like the paus screen, end screen, etc. I haven’t done much this week for our game, so I’ll add all the stuff I did last week that I didn’t include in my previous blog post. Although, it wasn’t included because I hadn’t done it yet, not because I didn’t feel like writing aobut it. Last week on thursday I continued and finished the death animations for the trees / towers. We discussed having one single animation for the trees, however I felt that since the trees looked so different from one another I wanted to make special death animations for each and every one of them. I was supposed animate all 9 trees, but our lead art wanted to make a few of them too, which helped out a ton. It gets tiring quicker than you think, and thanks to his help I only had to do 6 of the animations, and they were all finished within one day. These were the first trees I made death animations for: Ash 1: Ash 2: Trees (or towers) are built using one or two of three different seed types. These are magic trees and are built using only the magic seed. A couple of weeks ago or so I posted the attack animations I made for the trees. For these trees I had a light effect that covered the tree. Therefore I wanted the death to mirror the attack in some way, and decided on making it look like it dries out and turns to ashes. Hence the trees name Flower Tree: Since it’s a flower I just wanted a simple animations where it looks like it withers, or dries out. Very simple and maybe a bit anti-climactic in comparison to the Ash trees, but I didn’t want to over complicate things. There has to be some simple ones in my opinion. Pine 1: Pine 2: For the pine trees me and our lead art discussed what they could look like, and we both like the idea of all the needles falling of, revealing the bare tree under it. Kinda like a christmas tree in the middle of April. Slime Tree: For the slime tree I was a bit stumped for a while, in regards to how I wanted to make it die. One of my friends then suggested to make it look like it squeezes itself to death. So I tried to make it look like it sucks in it’s slime, as well as the color in it’s trunk, and then have the crown morph itself to a smaller size as it’s green ooze pours out. It sounds a bit more disgusting in written form than it actually looks. This was, like with the pine trees, a more comedic idea. Now to quickly show what I’ve worked on this week. I’ve been animating some effects for a power up and some on-hit effects on enemies from trees.
This is the stop effect that appears on enemies when the player picks up one of the power ups. One of the ideas was to make a net-like web that covers the enemy, and stops them death in their track. However, I figured that it would be better to have the icon used for the power up cover the enemy instead, to make it more clear what is going on.
This is the poison effect that appears on an enemy that has been attacked by the flower tree. A simple animation in 7 frames where bubbles pop over their heads. At first I wanted to make the animation green, since green is more associated to poison. However, since the entire game is roughly 80% green I felt that the colors would’ve meshed too much. Also, the flower trees projectile is yuellow, so yellow was a better fit all together.
This is the healing effect that appears over trees once the player picks up the healing power up. The effect is green in this case, but will be over the trees, so it won’t mesh too much with the background. I simply finished this one though, since our lead artist didn’t have the time to.
This is the slime effect that ppears on enemies that have been attacked by the slime tree. Enemies that have been attacked by this tree are slowed down, I decided to make the slime effect big so it showed up well on the enemies. The color was also kept green here, since the trees projectile is green. All these effects only last for 10 seconds, which is why I kept them quick and simple. I felt no need to make the animations more complicated since they’re so small and will only be on screen for a short period of time. That’s all for this week, and since this was my last obligatory blog post I might not post next week. I’ll try though, since I’d like to make an update about our finished product. I’ll most likely start blogging again once our next course starts as well. That one will be a lot more interesting though. Thank you for reading! /Holm  |
