Blog week 2 – Wingflap animation
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More animations? Ofcourse! This week I have, among other things, worked with giving our protagonist some life, as the poor thing so far have been without wings (and a head for a while). As the programmers had written code to figure out the players hitbox from its pixels, and the head of the owl shall be able to move around 360 degrees, we decided to split the sprite into three pieces. First of all the head needed to be it’s own ”sphere” so that it could turn around freely, and we didn’t want the wings to be included into the players hitbox as it simply would be too large to be fair.
As a start of this work I looked up a little information about how wings work in motion, not because I didn’t know before, but because I needed to freshen up my memory, especially about how long it takes to flap the wing down and then pull it up again. As the wing is faster on the way down I understood that there’d have to be a bigger step between frames needed to simulate that motion and a smoother progression of frames to give a more detailed representation of the wing on the way up.
This is the sprite-sheet for the animation, it’s 8 frames long and each frame is played at the speed of 0,06 seconds. I have yet to see it in game, but I’m pretty sure it’ll work fine as I used the owl-sprite as a measurement when I put the different frames in the sprite-sheet, so I wouldn’t get the placement wrong. If there is one thing that bugs me, it’s that the owls body looks very stiff as it is now, the wings are moving nicely, but the rest of the bird looks as fluid as a piece of wood. Because it’s split into different parts, that’s something I’ll have do to the other pieces though.
Speaking of flying animation, the children need some love too. This one was much more simple because A: The owlet has smaller wings that are easier to animate and B: since I imagine the owlets would flap faster to stay airborne, less frames were needed. It’s made out of 4 frames, with 0,04 seconds between each frame. As you can see I also put some wind into it’s tail feathers, giving the sprite a bit more life, something that I’ll probably do to the owl mother too later. So that was all for this week, I hope you found it interesting!  |
