First Post!
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Gustav here, with my first post about the Potato Pirates project! I’m part of team 7 and we’re studying game design, first year, on Gotland. We are currently doing a game called Potato Pirates, a topdown spaceshooter about smuggling potatoes! Early in the making of our game, we felt like we needed a clear visual representation of when you lose or “game over”, if you will. The alpha needs only the bare essential visuals and we felt that the death animation of the player was such a feature. Mind you, this death animation may not be the final version and will be improved upon if I have time later; however, in the alpha, it will suffice as a signal to the player. Last week, I was in charge of making a death animation for our avatar. I wanted the plane to not just explode but also lose altitude and then crash. I did that by copying the plane a few times and making it smaller each time. I also added the extra feature of the broken of wing because I felt like that signals ”oh no” on a plane better than most other things plane-related. The only problem I had with this was, where does the wing go? I can’t let it be on seperate images because that would be too much of a headache for the programmers. So, I simply let the broken wing fly along with the rest of the plane and crash. This may not agree with physics but we’ll see if I change it later on. When the animation is actually excecuted in the game, the player will not be just dropping straight down like the little video you see here. Instead, the player will be moving in the direction it’s heading for the duration of the animation and then stop when the explosion happens. This was before we had any lessons on the subject and I simply made a lot of pictures that kind of looked like they went together and said to the programmers ”here you go!” They went mad and said something about a spritesheet so Sakarias, the colormanager on our team, went and made that for me, truly a gentleman!
Since it’s very hard for the programmers to put the individual pictures (sprites) into the actual game. Coding it gets significantly easier if you put those sprites into a spritesheet, like the one above. The spritesheet contains all the frames of the animation in the correct order and size in one single document. Just for fun, here you have the concept art I made of the plane in question!
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