Game Design Week 3 – The Making of a Jellyfish
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For my group Troll’s project – developing our take on the game concept Depth – I have this week been working on, among other things, the swimming animation of a jellyfish. Depth will, briefly put, be about a submarine navigating an underwater cave system, and escaping a large monster that is constantly on its tail. To make the whole thing harder, the player will have to also shoot and avoid both fish and rubble. The jellyfish I have made is one of three moving enemies, of which I am in charge of two. As a placeholder I had previously quickly drawn a small sample jellyfish, just to try out some colours and form, and the time I spent on it is reflected in the quality of it.
With the design in place, I broke down the different parts of the creature based on what was going to move and deform. There were three main parts which I named appropriately: big blob, squishy stuff underneath, and stingy strings. The tail was further divided into three separate layers to simplify and speed up the animation process.
I use Photoshop for almost all my drawings and this time was no exception. Using the frame animation timeline and the move and transformation tool I then put together a rather short (7 frame) movement for the jellyfish. The big blob and squishy stuff look fine in the finished sequence, but there is definitely room for improvement with the tail as it is visibly stale. This will either not be so obvious in-game, or I will have keep it as a polish project later in the development cycle.  |
I think the pink in this image is really pops nicely, as we are going for bright colours in a dark place. The blue however was not something I wanted to bring over to the more polished version, as I felt it would lose its effect against a dark blue background. So, instead I opted for a more muted version of the pink, borrowing some of the blue, resulting in a more violet shade. As for the shape of the jellyfish, well it had quite a cool “mushroom hat” form to it which I thought would be fun to put in motion. (It was)
