Week five post
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This week, like the one before, has been dedicated to making the final animations for the main character of our game: Captain Noleg. This week i have started on several of the animations we will need for the captain, one of them being an animation of him throwing his harpoon. This animation could be seen as one of the ”core animations” on account of it being visual feedback that is triggered when performing a core mechanic of the game. Namely throwing the harpoon.
As the more attentive of you might see, the captain has seemingly misplaced his right arm. This is because there has been some changes made regarding how i animate the captains sprites. Previously (as seen in last weeks post) i have animated and exported the entire animation in one image. Continuing to do this would however result in a lot more work than necessary. The reason to this is that the captain will have two possible appearances so to speak. One where he ha his harpoon over his back and one where he has thrown it. Since he can swim around with or without the harpoon we would need at least two separate animations for when he had the harpoon and when he had thrown it. Unless we split the animation up that is, which is what you see above. From now on i will put the right arm (and the harpoon it’s holding) in a separate spritesheet. This animation will then be anchored to the captains and voila. No need to export every frame of animation for the captain two times. Now regarding the animation itself. When making an attack animation (for the player character) it is important to keep in mind not to make the animation too long. If the player hits the attack button and it takes ten seconds for her character to actually attack she will be frustrated, at least in a game such as ours where the players movements is somewhat restricted in the first place and she is constantly being attacked by enemies. If that’s the case it doesn’t matter if the animation leading up to it looks good, it will still only be annoying. Also for the first time i tried to add a bit of motion blur in order to make the transition between the most extreme arm positions smoother without removing the sense of speed and force int the throw. I’d say it turned out pretty okay.  |
