Blog week 3 -Thundercloud and powerline animation
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This week has been a week of ELECTRICAL ANIMATION! I have two artefacts to show this time, both sharing the theme of a high voltage-count. For now I’ll start with the thundercloud wich has been the meatiest of all of the animation I’ve worked on so far. The thundercloud is one of our hazards in the game. It’s a sinister cloud that moves across the top of the screen and shoots down a bolt of lightning at regular intervals that the player has to look out for.
So this is the first animation I created. It’s alright, it’s functional, but I felt that there was something missing. A lack of force. A bolt of lightning is not just any old zap from a faulty power outlet. It’s a zigzaging beam of focused electrical energy that strikes down onto the earth from the heavens! Simple to say, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it. So I thought about how I could give it that extra ”Omph!” that it needed, and I realised that the fault didn’t lie in the lightning itself, but in the cloud floating above.
There’s a basic rule in animation, that if you want to make a good looking, fluid and weighty motion you should use ”squash and stretch”. While animating the cloud I made use of squashing, as I not only pushed the cloud up a little, but also added particles wich torn off and pushed away from the cloud simulating a invisible force. The trickiest part of this was to make the cloud fluidly return to its original state so the animation could loop. By cross-referencing the frames before and after each frame I drew worked out in the end, although it’s a bit unrealistic how the cloud kind of bounces a bit like jelly. The animation is made out of 16 frames, played up at a speed of 0,06 seconds between frames, with the sprite being about 160 pixels of height and 560 pixels of width. There may still be some rough edges that I could smooth out, but overall I am quite satisfied with how it turned out. I feel like I got the power that I was looking for.
So this is the other electricity-themed artefact I worked on this week. It’s quite simple. A powerline that has to give away some kind of effect so that the player will know A. That it’s a powerline and B. That they probably shouldn’t cuddle with it. It’s exaggerated, pointy, fast and erratic as to look threatening to the player. It’s made out of 5 frames that are played at a speed of 0,05 seconds per frame. It’s too bad that it got scrapped. The way this hazard worked was very similiar to how another functioned, so we at the team found it unnecessary and redundant. Even though we probably should have reached this conclusion earlier I’m not heartbroken about it, that’s just what happens sometimes. And I still got experience doing it. So this has been my week of high-voltage animation. Have a good day/evening, dear reader!  |
