Blog week 2 – Title screen
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Another week has passed and ”Space Giraffa” is slowly progressing into a proper game. This week I have been working on the title screen for our game, specifically the interface in our title screen.
Let me explain. Basically what I’ve been trying to do is make an animation for the text in the title screen, so it will shine up or glimmer when the player presses a key to start the game. After discussing it with the other graphic students in my group we thought it would look nice if the yellow stripe in the ”Space Giraffa” text would sweep across the letters in a shine-like effect. I also planned to make it glimmer while it’s idle. This became a much bigger challenge than I thought it would be, but not because it was too hard to animate. Apparently doing this animation on such a large text would put much strain on the programmers who at this point are already overloaded with code work. On the other hand, we couldn’t just have a static start screen with no visual feedback since it would be a very boring first impression. After a lot of discussion with our lead mechanic, we came up with a solution. Instead of doing idle animations, the programmers will code the text to have a floating effect by simply making the text zoom lightly in and out. I would then animate the ”press any key to play” text to have a yellow streak run through the letters (similar to how I planned the Space Giraffa text-animation). This solution would put the least amount unnecessary work on the programmers while still being visually appealing. Having solved this problem, I could finally get to work. Firstly, I saved both texts as separate files for the programmers to use in the idle state. After that I started my animation progress, which ended up being quite easy to do. To sum it up I simply drew a yellow streak on a separate layer over the text, which I then moved a bit frame by frame and tweaked until I was satisfied. The result became this (it will not loop in the game):
I will probably clean it up a bit later in the project, but for now I just want to see it implemented in the game and see if it works out. That’s all I have for today! See you next week~ -Malin Runsten Fredriksson, Group 9
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