Hearts, Hearts, Hearts!
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Alright, so as the title may imply I have been working on hearts this week, among other things. The hearts that I am talking about are the healthpoints. We had some sort of healthpoints before but we have reworked them about 3 times now. The first hearts looked good but was made to fit with out first HUD layout with smudged edges and a lot of colors. When we decided to make everything simple and less smudged we remade those into a placeholder heart which was not animated nor looked that good. After that I made a couple hearts but none of them was animated and made the HUD look flat and boring. So I decided to actually do these hearts one last time now and even animate them. I have worked with animation before, but it is not something that I am super good at. But Did first of all try to make the heart pump and grow a little, but it did not look that good. In our group we are trying to work with 3 frames animations so I try to keep to that as well. One simple thing I then tried was to use a sort of glow effect to stimulate the growing, so I added a copy of the heart behind it, make it bigger and used a blur on it and lower the opacity. Then I made 3 frames where that heart glows. I also had to make a death animation for the heart for when you lose one. I wanted the heart to lose the glow and change the color to a more dead color. Here I added some cracks to the first one and lowered the opacity for the glow. For the next one I removed the opacity and started to move the cracked parts away from each other as well as change the color of the heart fragments. For the last one I simply continued with moving them apart and added a even darker color. The one thing I really had a problem with however was to get the hearts to fit into a spritesheet. I had trouble to get them to be exactly right and the animation was shaking and didn’t looked smooth at all. This problem should be avoided now in the next days as one of my team member have gotten a program that sets up a spritesheet. So we will see how it worked out.
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