Week 2 – Death Animation
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This week we have had a ton of stuff to do because the Alpha presentation day is approaching! I have had my hands full with different tasks but in this post I am going to talk to you about the artifact I focused on the most: the earth enemy’s death animation. The earth enemy is going to appear in the Alpha which we are presenting on Friday so I wanted to put all my focus on working on the most important animations, and I think the death is one of them. The reason why I made a specific animation just for the death is simple. In my opinion it would be just plain boring if the enemy would simply vanish into thin air after getting shot.
There was a bunch of different ways to accomplish the task. This is why I had a hard time deciding whether the enemy should just fall into the ground, crumble to pieces or perhaps something else. I thought the most ”visually attractive” solution would be it falling into the ground but also vanishing little by little. The reason why I didn’t want to include the crumbling idea in any ways, was the fact that I thought it could look very confusing especially when it comes to making it in pixel art. When I started working on the project, I was relieved when I noticed that I could use the same base layers in this as I used in the running animation. It made things a whole lot easier! Furthermore, the art for the running enemy consisted of floating body parts, such as the head and the arms so it also supported my idea of the body parts slowly starting to fall off. Some minor elements which I added into the animation were the black eyes, the falling head and the vanishing effect. Normally the enemy had yellow eyes but to add more detail and after talking with one of my group members, I decided it would be the best if the enemy’s eyes turned black so it would seem even more lifeless. The reason why I decided to start the animation by making the enemy’s head fall first off was the fact that I think it gave the final and official sign to the player that the enemy has been defeated. Also, the vanishing effect was something to be excited about. It would have been dull if the body parts just simply fell off, so instead of doing that, I decided to lower the opacity of the layers progressively until everything disappeared.  |
