Desolate Echo – Week 6

This week I worked on some animations for the Spyderling – one of the enemies in the game – and specifically on its death animation. I am really satisfied with the result.

When we first conceptualized the spyderlings, we envisioned them to be either creatures made up in part of crystals or to be creatures that had crystals growing on/into them.
This affected the death animation, as we would have to decide whether to have blood in it or not. As of yet it is still not official, but I think we’re going with the bloody one because… well… cool.

So, this one was tough to make, I began by taking the image of an idle spyderling and making a few frames where the eyes start to glow brighter and brighter, I then proceeded to take the image and chop it up into a number of pieces. Next I painstakingly moved, rotated and cleaned up each piece (because of pixel distortion when rotating) and made sure that the movement of each piece followed the acceleration and deceleration of the explosive force.
I also discovered the hard way that in order for the movement to look anywhere close to natural you have to make the pieces move for a different amount of frames. It looked really silly when everything stopped at once, so I did some tweaking and it now looks more fluid and organic.

The explosive force that detonates the spyderling upon death was made by filling in the gaps when the spyderling first is starting to go apart with a purple-tinted white, culminating in one frame of a large explosion with long streaks of light.
The immediately following frame has a much smaller residual flare that diminishes in a smooth fashion, making it look like the explosion is the result of some built-up energy from the crystals. If the ship uses these crystals to power the ship, we reasoned, why couldn’t the crystals also infuse creatures with power of some kind?
Though not originally intended, this idea made for a nice piece of fluff and a nice effect.

The blood effect was achieved by filling out the space between detached limbs and other body parts with the green blood you see in the animation above.
Next, I just added some blood to each of the “contact surfaces” in each frame, i.e. the parts where exposed flesh and blood would be/come out and painted out the trajectories of the droplets and globs of innards.
I found out that if you make the actual flying pieces relatively small and the splash-down areas a little bigger while also ending the movement abruptly, you can create the effect of the blood being flung outwards and landing on the ground in a long streak.
All in all, a pretty nice effect if I may say so myself.

So, imagine now a player facing off against a group of between 10 and 30 of these things, fast and deadly but relatively weak. The player will take one out with one or two shots, resulting in a satisfying pop and a splatter of gore. When the dust settles there will be a field of blood and body parts strewn around (and hopefully the sprites won’t look all too plastered on top of one another), and the player might have some scrapes but hopefully they will still be flying, still searching the dark.

(Note: While I do enjoy gratuitous violence in video games, movies and such, I want to be clear that I abhor violence in real life; it belongs in fiction and nowhere else)

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