An over-whale-ming amount of whales

Yet another week spent dealing with whales, this time in the form of animation. A couple of weeks ago we made animations for our graphics class, and I made the choice to animate the boss of our game – Aetherial. In our version of the game, that boss is a whale inspired by Moby Dick, a design choice that can be read about here. I of course also made the animations because they were a requirement for the game, since all challenges need to be in the beta, and we wanted a boss.

The assignment was to animate a sprite, that could be for our games, at 24fps using the 12 principles of animation.  I started with the movement animation, as I at that point had not really received any directives from our game designer of what the whale was supposed to be up to, other than existing. As most creatures move in some way, it seemed like a fairly safe place to start. I tried to find a good video of how sperm whales move, but I couldn’t find any good reference. As such, I checked out some dolphin videos, since those are more popular, and based my movement around that. Dolphins are very fast and move quite linearly, and from what I found on youtube, sperm whales don’t move as speedily since they are quite a lot larger. I then exaggerated that movement and made it a lot slower and deeper to signal that the whale is heavy, which is one of the few things that were actually said in our user stories.

I started with a rough animation, to block out some shapes and general movement, which is this first gif.

I wasn’t really sure how to use for example the Squash and Stretch principle in a creature that wasn’t as acutely affected by gravity as most landdwelling creatures, but elected to apply stretch to the upcurve of the movement loop and squash on the downcurve. This made the whale look heavier than before, which was according to our user stories.

It did however also make it look squishier and softer than before, which wasn’t the intended effect. I tried to make the squash and stretch a little less pronounced, which sort of worked . I remade this animation at least five separate times. There were versions with arcs, versions without arcs, versions that were fast, and versions that were slow. The arcs, being one of the twelve principles of animation, did help a lot, as I struggled with keeping all of the limbs from jumping around too much. Having a clear thought with what I was doing and where I was going made the whale’s tail fins look a lot less deformed, as you can hopefully see in the second gif. The second gif is also slower in order to make the whale seem heavier, something I think was pretty effective. 

After going through all of that trouble and then doing it again for the colour I felt fairly satisfied. I proceeded to make an idle animation at the request of our designer, which was a lot harder than expected. Being idle in the ocean is just such a weird thing, because then it feels like the whale should just either sink or float, so I settled for the least movement I could. This animation had no squash and stretch, since not a lot is happening, which I found boring and annoying. It was a lot harder, I realized, to make a smaller movement and still make it feel alive than it was making a large movement. I once again made around five separate animations. I tried one version that was based on a pendulum which turned out horribly over-exaggerated, and some that were just plain jumpy. The version showed in the third gif is a little too fast, but I settled because I was running out of time.

After having done all of this, the team then had to reevaluate the whole boss situation since we were running out of time, and the person in charge of designing the boss fight was sick for more than a week without properly communicating with the rest of the team. With the playtest over and the beta looming above us, we debated long and hard whether or not we should have the boss at all or just have it as a common enemy. At last we decided on making a simpler boss for the beta and then expanding or possibly cutting it in the future. This new and revised boss fight didn’t include the first movement animation I made, only the idle. Annoyingly, all of that work will now never be included, and I can honestly not really blame anyone but myself for having spent so much time on a feature that was always going to be saved for last. The best thing I can say is that it was a great learning experience, because it was, but the fact that it was all sort of for nothing is incredibly annoying. Yet, who knows, maybe the final version of this game will include the movement animation. One can dream.

The rest of this week has been spent finalizing the idle animation for the boss. I had to add the crystals adorning the whale, both for the aesthetics of it as well as it being a possible mechaninc, and touch up the general design elements of it. It now at this present moment looks like this fourth gif. Looking at it now in this different setting and size, I cans see that it’s still too fast, and something I’ll have to look over, but it’ll do for a placeholder.

About Emma Jelving Eklund

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