Animating for our Space Shooter
Flight of the Giraffa – Update 1We are now a couple of weeks into our space shooter projects. My team and I over took the concept document for this game from another team, and our task is now to simply create the game in all of its intended beauty. In Flight of the Giraffa you play as Ginny, a heroic giraffe who’s been abducted by aliens together with her brother. After being subjected to all kinds of alien experiments, she gains the ability to fire projectiles from in between her horns. She is now fighting back trying to find her lost brother who’s being held captive somewhere amongst the alien fleet. I have the role as Game Designer in this project and I have up to this point been working a lot on writing our Game Design Document (GDD) as well as doing some art assets for the game. So the artifact from last week I wanted to write about is the projectiles I made that Ginny will be shooting. I put roughly about 6-7 hours in total into creating these, which is way longer than I originally anticipated. I started by sketching up a fireball like projectile, since I thought that I a fireball was something I later on would be able to animate. The other reason to why I choose this design was because I thought it looked really cool, and I also think it will feel really satisfying to just take down enemies with it.
Now came the time to polish it and create an animation for it, and since I really haven’t worked with 2D animation in Photoshop before, this could go both ways. The reason for me working in Photoshop so much is just because that’s what we mostly use in the 2D Graphics course. In order to make it so that it would fit in with the rest of the assets in the game, the lead artist in our group Theo Bengtson told me to give it thick outlines and bright, simple colors. And I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, it actually looks like something we could use
The reason for this asset taking so much time was because animating in Photoshop when you haven’t done it before is a real pain in the butt. I had to scrap and redo everything sometimes because the timeline function is really screwed me over. But trial and error has finally made me capable of animating in Photoshop, so for the next asset it will hopefully go smoother. See you next week!
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