Designing and Animating the Enemy
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When we created the farmer enemy, our team first had a quite extensive discussion about its design in the concept document and what about it we liked or disliked for our game. In the concept, the farmer had both a melee and a ranged attack. He had a pitchfork to attack the player with in close range and molotovs to throw at longer range as projectiles. personally I had nothing against the molotov projectiles. I thought it fitted the aesthetic aspect of the game – villagers using fire to kill people accused for using witchcraft (the player) in around the medieval era. The counter argument though was that, because the witch (player) can control fire as she can shoot fire projectiles – also, her hair is always on fire – it would seem contradictory for the enemies to use fire against her. So we instead decided that the farmer would also throw pitchforks as projectiles. As for the visual style I had pretty much free hands. The concept art for the farmer was very simple but yet convincing in the scene that he looked hostile. Sharp lines and shapes in contrast to the player characters smooth and soft shapes. As this usually is a very effective way to communicate to the player who’s friend or foe, I decided to go with it and put it in the style guide for our game. Applying this design in practice was not very hard. All I had to do was to avoid curved lines as much as possible and basically add edges to everything, the hat(head), shoulders, knees and shoes(toes), etc. I initially drew the line art very sloppy because we had decided that we wouldn’t have any line art in the final product. The style of the game would instead be much like a painting, with visible brush strokes and clear distinction in colors and contrast to tell everything apart. However, with the line art as it is, it is very easy to tell apart characters and enemy projectiles from the game environment. So we might actually keep the line art style which, in my eyes, has grown from sloppy to kind of cool in a unique way. When it comes to the actual animation of the character I used the frame by frame technique. These animations are basically 8 frame animations consisting of 5 different sprites. Considering that these are the two first animations i’v ever made, except for a bouncing ball, I must say that I’m somewhat satisfied. There are of course many things I can improve upon, for example redrawing all lines for every frame to make it feel more alive and in motion and adding follow through motion to loose objects like the hat.
One thing that I found specially hard when creating these animations was to get a good vision of the movement. Trying to imagine how a running man looks from above is not easy. What I did eventually was that I simply searched and found a slow-motion video of some one running which helped a lot even though it was taken from a side view. I didn’t do this for my first animation (the back view) which is why that one got a bit worse in my opinion. This is something I will take with me for any future animations I create. So, if you ever try to create a “realistic” animation, I would recommend to first look at and study the motion to get a better hold of it, either a recorded video or an animated or even better, both!  |
