The hardships of Animation, the Art of Time Management and of Being Sneaky.
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So. Visualise this. It’s 5 o’ clock in my quite dark room, and the candle I cerimoniously light every time I start getting ready for a long session of drawing has long since burned out. The sun has already begun to rise, and outside my window the birds (read: crows) have already started to chirp (read: caw). My bed is perfectly made, and I’m not in it. It’s not a pretty thought, but it is how most days look when I’ve been animating some sort of asset for our game. Late nights, aaand – well, quite late mornings as well, actually. After a while, I audibly groan, and start shuffling towards the comfort of my bed – never completely satisfied with the work I had done that night. It’s safe to say that I have not yet gotten used to animations, but it has gotten better. As some of my friends might be able to testify, I do complain a lot about animating. I have never done it before, not even in that way some kids did in middle-school, flipping through a notepad and my lack of experience shows. Despite of this, I do quite enjoy it. Making an animation that looks good, drawing in the way I do, is not efficient. My favourite part of drawing is putting small details into whatever I’m drawing. Details that I notice, but that people viewing casually might not. Stuff like the supplies a character is carrying, giving some kind of information about the nature of his character, or like air-intakes/vents along the side of something that is supposed to be very hot. Re-drawing these kinds of things for every frame of an animation is inefficient at best. To get used to animation as a whole, I started out drawing fairly complicated things, but abstract – that I could afford to have not look pixel-perfect. Things like smoke, fire and explosions – I figured, was a good start. My first animation was this: And it, while at least showing what action is occuring, does look humorously horrendous. It’s too unassuming, and doesn’t look remotely powerful enough. I’m not going to dwell on it, it was the first animation, except a simple ball-bouncing one, that I have ever done. It’s fine. It’s decent. It gets the job done. For my second animation, I wanted to make something a bit more complicated, and I decided on the missile-sprite that gets shot out of the cannon. This is what I came up with.
I quite like it. In hindsight, I should have made the actual rocket rotate or something to look more interesting mid-air. It’s would’ve been good practice, and wouldn’t have taken too much extra time. I do however feel decently satisfied with how the flames and the smoke looks. It’s not even close to as good as I would want it, but once again – it gets the job done. It’s going to be small, so people would probably not really notice it rotating anyway. Time better spent on something else, in my honest opinion. For my third animation, i was pressed for time, in a major way. I needed an enemy made and to be put into the game quickly for me to see the sizing and things like that. I decided on drawing our ”shooter” enemy – it was not going to move much, except for some simple fire out of its tail-end, and this is when I figured I could be sneaky. I had already drawn most of the sprite, or at least had sketched it out. I finished it (slowly, taking my time as I always do, sadly) and after animating half of a flame coming out from it, I thought to myself ”Hey, I already spent too much time on this sprite. Can I complete it faster somehow?” and it dawned on me that I could sneakily steal my own asset, and use it for the next sprite. This is the result.
Honestly, it could look worse. I still think it’s too simple, but it works! I really want to have some sort of tilt going on when it flies, but I’m not entirely sure as of how to make that work with the sprite that I already have. If whomever reads this have some sort of magic trick to make that work down his or her sleeve, make sure to tell me it. I would love to know. Once again, not even close to perfect, but it’s usable and gets the job done. I now were caught up to where I needed to be in our sprint, and I felt confident that I had time to make a more advanced sprite for my next one. Our game is pretty much centered around the explosions of enemies, missiles and other general explosions, so I thought it fitting to make some kind of explosion that could be used for, well, explosions across the board. It needed to be pretty enough that people didn’t get sick of seeing it instantly, and having being bothered by the ”laggyness” of my other sprites, I wanted it to look smooth as butter. I decided on making the explosion in 30FPS (some people will complain that nothing less than 60FPS could be considered ”smooth as butter” but I mean it in a comparative way, with my other animations) The animation is probably not going to be a full second either, so the ~25 frames that it consists of might actually be closer to 45FPS or something. Someone else will have to do the math, I really can’t be bothered. Anyway, here it is:
Anyway, this is a long tirade. I feel bad for anyone who has to read this, but it’s more to put my frustrations with the medium down on paper than to entertain, I think. I hope that whomever reads this has a great weekend, and if you read it late, a great week. Thanks for reading!  |
I think most people would agree that it’s much better than my other animations. Of course, it won’t loop crazily like that in-game, but at least it somewhat looks like an explosion. I’m quite happy with it. Happy enough, at least. I won’t be ashamed to have it in the game. I could’ve spent more time to make the timing and the fade-out better – but it took me so embarrassingly long to make that I grew gray hairs in my stubble. I hope someone likes it, at least. I spent way too much time on it, but it is something that will pop up like every second in-game, so it has to look passable at least.