Week 1 – Running Animation
|
My chosen artifact for this week is the earth enemy animation idle. Our art style which we chose for the game was pixel art so I knew I was going to have a problem or two. Our game is a top-view autoscroller where you meet a countless number of enemies until you arrive at the end, and finally, face the boss. We have three different types of enemies which we have to make for each level, but for the Alpha, we decided to choose the charger enemy because it was the most basic one of them. First, we decided on how big our sprites were supposed to be but it was more complicated than we thought. In the end, my sprite was 64×64 but I had to resize it a couple of times after discussing with my group members. We were also wondering should the enemy be bigger or smaller than the avatar but we decided it would be best if they were the same size. Only the boss was noticeably larger. Creating pixel art in Photoshop was quite new and scary experience for me but after a while it started to get easier. However, the shading part was a complete disaster. We didn’t want to use too many colors because we decided to stick with a limited palette. …And I thought creating pixel art would be a piece of cake. Regarding the game, the most crucial part of the process was the animation. We wanted everything in the game to be dynamic, so the player would be constantly ”on the move”. Never had I done any animations before but I think I got a hold of the basics quite fast. Our animations were supposed to be from the front angle and I have to admit that it was a bit harder than expected. Trying to match the movement of the legs and the arms and especially trying to get ”dimension” into the movement. Also, it was excruciating to decide how the enemy should run. I know it sounds weird but the fact that the enemy was basically a big earth-related rock, it could have a multiple different ways of running. For example, the running could be heavy stomping because of it’s huge mass. Then again, I wanted the running to be fast-paced so the player feels the incoming threat. I must say it was not easy and I am still not quite pleased with the result. I think my progress got severely slowed down because of the lack of layers. Usually I simply just start drawing and realize only later that I should do every part of the body on different layer especially when it comes to creating animations. The animation I created for the earth enemy was very simple. Maybe a bit too simple, but with this little experience I didn’t want to risk ruining everything.
-Karoliina Hiidenheimo  |
