Blog week 1: Idle animation
|
The artifact I’ve done is the idle animation for the boss. This animation was necessary because the player needed some sort of input that the game is still active and that the sprite has some sort of purpose other than just decoration. The game is typically an autoscroller until you reach the boss area, then the map will stop and you’ll see the boss there and it would feel awkward if the sprite was completely still which would disrupt the player’s immersion. The first thing to be done was to decide on how big the sprite was supposed to be, we took the size of the player avatar in consideration when creating it and by following the concept of ”the power of two” we decided that would 128×128 would be a good size. As we use pixel graphics we had to be extra careful to make sure that the relationship between all of the sprites are the same, because even though we are able to scale the sprites up would also be extremely obvious if only one sprite is scaled as the size of one ”pixel” would differ from sprite to sprite. The sprite was first sketched up in PaintTool Sai as it was the software I was personally more comfortable with and as it has the option of saving files in the .psd format it worked out without any repercussions as I could open it up in Photoshop wall of my layer information still intact in preparation for my animation When making the sprite I made sure to keep all of the parts on a separate layer, this was to make it so that it would be easier to move the sprite without needing to redraw and add information later increasing the risk of the inconsistency that could occur if a pixel or two were off on different frames, causing flickering which would be disruptive for the player as well as tough on the eyes. While it’s true that setting everything up in folders made it easier as I only needed to move one folder for each pieces instead of drawing everything out again, as mentioned earlier. I went ahead ad started on the animation too early just to see how it would look like before the sprite itself was done as it lacked shading. Because of that I had to go back and change big parts afterwards make sure it all fit once I started to shade, and I had to spend more time than otherwise necessary to make sure it worked so that was a mistake on my part, but at least I learnt the lesson early on in production. The animation itself was fairly simple as it was just the separate parts moving up and down, in a rhythm. I didn’t have that much leeway with it however as the sprite covered nearly the entire canvas so I could only move it a few pixels, but it didn’t affect the end result and it worked out pretty well, but it might cause some problems in the future.
 |
