Project Aetherial Blog Four
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Introduction We are rapidly approaching the BETA and a lot of things must be decided and implemented. Playtesting sessions has come and passed by, with a great many relevant comments having helped us shape our game. Aside from the game design course, we graphical artists have also had our hands full with the animations of our minor course. For this week’s blog I will put my focus on the final “common” enemy of our game, which is the so-called sky tangler (a jellyfish). This is the last enemy to be implemented in time for the BETA, apart from the boss. We have had the strategy thus far to introduce new enemies in all levels, with the two first enemies, the sky glaucus and sky pufferfish, in level one (for the ALPHA), the sky ray in level two (which people got to see at the last playtesting session), and finally the sky tangler in level three (which we will present at the BETA). The Sky Tangler This is an enemy which kept its name from the original concept document, but not its behavior. Several other teams have adapted the same concept document as my team and most seems to have kept the jellyfish as a melee attacker. With that in mind, our team decided to change it into an enemy which shoot projectiles at the player. It was also a result of already having two non-shooting enemies in the game. The sky tangler will spawn at the bottom of the screen, move upwards, and when in line with the player, shoot at them. Once hit by the player, it will die. In my previous blogs I have described my reasoning behind the design choices when it comes to color. When it comes to the shape of this enemy, it has been redesigned due to reasons stated below (the original design had a bit more “features”). The markings on the enemy is a result of synchronizing it with the final boss and will be implemented in the other three enemies designs as well.  Movement animation I made the first animation of the sky tangler for my animation assignment in the minor course. Since the jellyfish has a peculiar way of moving, I felt the movement animation would make for a good application of the animation principles of squash and stretch. At the same time, I started to comprehend the difficulty of animation and as a result ended up redesigning all the common enemies. My hope is that the final versions of the animations will be a little smoother with the simpler shapes of the new designs. All my animations are still off in some places, but I see some improvement with the latest versions. The plan is to, after the BETA has passed, implement all the new animations for the final gold version of the game. As with my other animations, this one was made in Photoshop, with the timeline tool, and frame by frame animation. It is still a work in progress with missing lightning and lack of crystals and markings, but the line art and main colors are final.  Lightning attack Seeing as the jellyfish can sting in real life to defend itself, our teams’ designer wished for the sky tangler to have an “electrical” type of attack. This was a bit tricky, seeing as I had never done anything like that before. At first, I made a simple zigzag shaped projectile which were completely static, which could be shot at the player. I felt this was rather uninspiring though and went on to make the version seen below. I feel content with it, since it was an experiment in seeing if I could create something resembling a lightning bolt. When trying it in Unity, I found it felt better when you reduced the speed value, as it built anticipation.  Death The last part which is not yet finished, the death animation. I have had some lack of inspiration as of how the poor jellyfish will perish. At first, I planned to have it simply drop down like the sky glaucus or the sky ray or blowing to bits like the sky pufferfish. I have also entertained the idea of it “hugging” itself and then saunter downwards, as jellyfishes in general move rather slowly. This will probably require some more sketch work before I come up with a solution, though I definitely see it implemented in the BETA version. And so, the curtain falls on another blog, thank you for reading! //Therese  |