I’m hot cause I’m fly(ing)
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Hi there, neighbor and welcome to yet another post about big bugs in space caves. Writing about animating bugs is slowly but surely becoming my jam, though in this post I will focus foremost on the design choices. Honestly, this week has been somewhat uneventful. In order to spare you from reading all about how I messed around with SFX and played weird arcade games (for research purposes… well, sort of) I will instead write about something which I did most of in the past weeks and just kind of tweaked this week. Enough dawdling, here goes: This, as you can hopefully see, is a mean bug. To be more precise it is my stylized interpretation of a yellowjacket, which is an insect in the wasp family. It is also the concept art of the main aerial enemy in our game.
…but it didn’t feel quite right. I played around a little with the pose and for good measure I gave it glowing red eyes rather than the black with a red sheen that adorned its predecessors head.
It was better. We required aerial enemies and as usual when I feel inspired to work within a theme that I’m not particularly accustomed to, in this case insects because ew, I turned to google and wikipedia. Of all the flying creepy crawlies I came across I thought the yellowjacket looked the most dramatic and mean, so obviously it was my first choice for the aerial enemy. The above drawings were square one. From there I went on to draw it how I wanted it to look in game:
As you can see it is far simpler than the concept art, because let’s face it, the concept has way too many details and too little contrast to work in game considering its intended size. So I tweaked my original and changed the pose a bit more. After that I made the frames for its basic movement animation:
I did my best to make the movement seem… “alive.” I wanted the wings to look soft and delicate in contrast to the rest of the little murderbug which is quite hard looking with it’s hard lines and sharp corners. …and then I made its attack animation:
I made it a little bit blurry when it attacks in order to give the feeling of speed. I struggled quite a bit with the ranged spider, and I believe that I have that to thank for the fairly painless experience while working on the yellowjacket. Anyway, that’s it for this week, Peace out!  |
