Jellyfish on the Move
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This week I would like to talk about the design and animation process of our second enemy, the jellyfish. The enemy jellyfish has normal movement speed, low damage and has melee attack. It also latches onto the player avatar and slows it. I liked the idea of a jellyfish gliding in the sky because of its natural movement pattern. And thought the leg and tentacle movement would look aesthetic. I started the design process by looking up several jellyfish types, and came up with a simple version of a jellyfish with 3 legs and fewer tentacles. That way it wouldn’t distract the player with too many details, and would make it easier to animate. The character has the major color as purple, minor color as pink and accent as yellow. Purple is a bold and active color that catches the eyes. Pink is a good highlight to purple and since yellow is the contrasting color, I thought they would make a good combination. I made a pattern on the jellyfish head with light color, that way it would imitate it being transparent. To animate the character, I again looked up on how jellyfishes move, and according to the info gathered, the movement pattern was designed by paying attention to animation principles. I tried to imitate anticipation, squash and stretch and arc movement with as less frames as possible. The movements were also designed faster than a regular jellyfish since it’s a fast pace game. Here is how it moves:
During the animation work I had a harder time than I thought, because considering every leg and tentacle’s movement separately in each frame was not very easy. Even though I used puppet warp and copied some frames, still there were so many parts needed to be drawn by hand/edited. And just making the enemy move was not the issue, it had several different animations for attack/move too. So far this is the enemy I put the most work into. It became a bit overwhelming in the end, and I started questioning why I didn’t pick something easier to animate. Nevertheless I learnt many things from it  |
