Itsy Bitsy Spider

Our current assignment is to create a game based on another group’s concept, in our case we are working on Colussus Core, originally put together by Group 15.

This particular week I’ve been working on animation of enemies (of which a still can be seen at the top of this post.) Seeing how animation is really not my forte and I haven’t actually worked with it in depth for years, it was, or perhaps I should say is since I have yet to produce anything that isn’t just the worst, quite a challenge.

This enemy falls within the categories of Minion> Ground Type> Ranged. It moves along the walls of the cave and shoots its venom at our avatar, the ship Aquila. The Ranged Spider is the first enemy one will come across while playing Colussus Core. They are, as mentioned, a minion type enemy and are thus fairly weak compared to the challenges the player will meet later on in the game. The Ranged Spider is a recurring enemy and various versions (all mostly the same, following the same behavioral patterns) will appear in several different levels.

Regarding the design I pretty much just figured that:

• It lives in a cave and spits goo, so a spider makes sense
• It’s venomous> in nature bright color= venom/poison> bright colors make sense
• It should still be able to blend into the dark caves a bit for added creepiness, so it can’t be too brightly colored
• The ship was designed to have fairly cold colors, ex. cyan, gray, blue, cool brownish tones, while the cave was supposed to mostly be brown, yellow, and black, so going with a mostly purple/magenta enemy seemed like a good idea in order to keep the game interesting to look at despite being quite dark
• Glowing eyes are creepy so let’s go with that
• Added bones/growths on the skull makes it look more aggressive

I’ve mostly used Toon Boom Harmony for animations as it’s, well, the program I first decided to try out (it was recommended during a lecture) and there were a fair share of decent tutorials for it. It’s worked fine and whatever problems I’ve come across have most likely been the result of my lack of skill and experience rather than the program itself. Hopefully I’ll figure out how to animate a spider without it looking like an affront to whatever you believe in before this time next week. Hopefully.

About Beatrice Kristina Franov Johansson

2015 Graphics

View all posts by Beatrice Kristina Franov Johansson →