Blog 4
Squids and their movementSo this week I will go back a bit and take a look at how I designed the second enemy in our game, the giant squid. I will as per usual attempt to reflect and reason a bit around the decisions i made while working on the squid. So for this game revolving around mystery and uncertainty I wanted the an enemy that reflects those feelings. Now, while the Great white I worked on previously is a fitting enemy based on the game’s setting and the traits the Great white is associated with, it is not good enough when it comes to evoking a feeling of mystery. Enter the giant squid.  The giant Squid is not just any normal squid that’s scaled up in game to look scary, it is actually a species of Cephalopode that grows up to 5 meters tall mantle and arms. But when you count in the feeding tentacles it can be up 13 meters tall. The reason for why it is not so well known is because it normally inhabits very deep parts of the sea and even the scientists do not have much information on it. Long story short it is not only big and scary, but also very mysterious. So now that we have found a good animal it is time to draw it. The first thing I noticed is that the sprite wouldn’t work very well if I drew the feeding tentacles in scale with the body, so I made them a bit shorter. The second thing I noticed was that the colour of the squid makes it stand out a lot,so I made it a bit less saturated and also pushed the hue a bit towards the purple side of red as opposed to the orange one.
However it did not visually pop as much as I first thought and after some feedback from my team I made it a bit more red.
For the animation I wanted it to squash and stretch a bit, since the shark didn’t do much of that. The idea is that it squashes together as it brings up it’s tentacles and then “shoots” forward as it swipes them down. Then there would be a time where it does smaller movements as it is still carrying momentum from the big swipe. In order to save myself some time on animating all of its arms I decided to only frame-by-frame animate the two tentacles and two of its arms. The other arms were animated much shorter on a layer behind the squid and loop multiple times per animation cycle.  |
