Animating attacking enemies
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This week I have started animating the enemies that I designed and wrote about last week. My current goal is to finish rough animations for all the movements of the three enemies by the end of the week, and up till now my focus has been the attacking actions for them. For this post I will be focusing on the ghost teacher enemy, as I think it showcases the ideas that I have been working with the best. I wanted the enemy animations to be clear and easy to read for the player, as the player should be focusing on playing the game and not have to struggle with understanding what is happening in the game. To accomplish this, I made sure to have a clear anticipation for the hit as well as clear range and area for the hit itself. AnticipationIn the anticipation for the ghost teacher enemy’s attack I made them extend their hand upwards. We tend to look at things starting from the top (The human has their face at the top of the body, which is important to notice when communicating. Therefore we have learned to look from up to down in order to notice important things first.), so holding the arm and stick high grabs attention. The arm is also the major moving object in the instance (The head also moves, but in the same way as the arm, so it just supports the movement of the bigger, more attention grabbing object.), so it drains the attention from the unmoving majority (in the same way that a black dot on a white paper becomes the focus of the attention. It’s the power of contrast~!).  Hit areaTo show the area of the hit clearly, I used a few very dragged out and smudged frames that would clearly mark the dangerous arc. I also made these frames visible for a long amount of time, in order for them not to be missed (this also gave them a fast, snappy movement, which doesn’t have to do with the area of the hit, but is good for the animation nonetheless, as it makes the attack hit hard).  For the process of making these rough animations, I started with taking the central movement (the swinging arm in the teachers case) and making a stickfigure-ish skeleton of that central part which I animated frame by frame. I adjusted the stickfigure animation with in-betweens and different frame lengths until I felt satisfied and felt comfortable moving on to adding general shapes and secondary actions to it. After that I just continued adding some detail and cleaning away unnecessary and confusing lines, so that others could understand the animation.  That’s all for this week, so see you space teacher dude… (yes, that was pretty bad).
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