Development blog 4: Animation and boss
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Good morning all. As one of the artist in group Zombie. I am excited to present you our 4th development blog- the animation and the boss. Now you already know how were the enemies and playable character designed, it is time for me to introduce you to the animations and boss in our Exploration game – Umibozu. Enemies in Umibozu need animations. Whenever the enemies attack, being attacked, being killed, there should be feedbacks for the players so that the player knows what is Happening. This is dynamic that helps the player to understand the mechanic of our game. Unfortunately, the enemies were drawn by me in one single layer and they were quite detailed, which was extremely hard to animate. Within the time limit, I wasn’t capable of finishing all the sprites needed for all enemies. In the end, our group decided to ease my workload by only letting me work on the death animation of the enemies. Death animations were the most important enemy animation for our players, it shows if the enemies are alive or dead while the other animations only show the status of the enemies that won’t affect the gameplay as much. A few of the death animations were shown below. Secondly, I designed the boss which is Umibozu. Umibozu are Japanese youkais(monsters) monk that appears at dusk on the ocean. They demand tribute from the fishermen and kill people who refuse to pay tribute. I wasn’t given freedom to design the boss by our lead graphic at first because he wanted to make the boss a Western-style monster instead of a monk and change the game’s name to something more Western to entertain Western players(the majority in our class). I didn’t know the reason but he somehow decided to let me create the boss by myself in the end. According to the lore, the youkai monk Umibozu has glowing blue eyes, bold, cloud-like torso and serpentine limbs. A cloud-like torso wasn’t applicable because there are way too many mists and clouds in our game, it was really hard for me to draw a could-like body and the mist at the same time while separating them efficiently. Serpentine limbs are boring to have since there were already way too many monsters with tentacles in our game. However, I did take in many designs from the lore, for example, being monk, glowing blue eyes, giant black body and so on. I also made Umibozu a feminine youkai so it stands out from other Umibozus from other groups. So this is currently my design for Umibozu.(by the way, this isn’t the final design of Umibozu. Play test our game to check her out in 1920×1080 and see how she will interact with the players!)
That concludes my 4th blog. In the end, as always, Thank you for following the development of Umibozu.
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