Green Warden: Week 4 – player character animation
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I didn’t update my blog last week, apologies! Things have been very busy lately. This week I’ve been working with animating the player character. The player character is a dryad whose goal is to protect the forest where they live. The forest is being invaded by goblins who wants to destroy everything and build factories there instead. They want to destroy the life tree, which is the source of life of everything in the forest. As the dryad, you don’t have any offensive abilities, but you can plant flowers which have certain effects that keep goblins away. In essence, it’s a tower defense game. For the art style we decided to keep it fairly simple with a cartoony style, but with a twist; everything has intricate patterns. This is to give the game a more unique look but also to avoid having to shade everything too much, since we realized this is typically what makes a game look inconsistent. When painting, everyone shades their drawing differently, and it’s difficult to change the way you do it. So, the player character! I have been working with the dryad ever since we started this project. I have made several concept art pieces of them, but they are all relatively similar. The dryad is the guardian of the forest and everything in it. They have humanoid characteristics but are clearly not human. In my original concept, they were much more slender and cute, but my team mates wanted something more dangerous and feral. I decided to make his body like the trunk of a tree that twists around itself. When I made the concept for the dryad Eva had already drawn some flowers, and I tried to keep it consistent and to make it look like they belong together. The dryad has arms but no hands, both because of simplicity for the sake of animation and to imply that the dryad can’t do much besides defend. Their face is fairly humanoid but with a very flat nose and completely green eyes. I gave him horns that are reminiscent of twisting branches. They also have a flower on their head as a decoration. The flower is similar to the ones Eva made and my idea was that the life tree itself would have these flowers too, to imply that they are connected. I always work in Photoshop while drawing, even though I realize it’s not always the best program, especially not when animating. However, I didn’t have time to learn a new program for this project.
When making the walking animations from each side I first made a base drawing of the dryad from the side in question. (This is for walking in a down/left direction.)
Then I made the dryad’s body and arms on separate layers. This allowed me to move them around independently of each other. Kind of like a paper doll with stud joints! In each new frame I squeezed the dryad together a bit and moved the arms closer to their body.
Honestly this way it mostly just looks like they’re breathing, but this is our walking animation for the dryad for now. I’m fairly new to animation and this was the best I could manage. I decided to make the dryad not have legs for a reason; it would be far too time consuming and difficult for me to animate that. I have begun making more animations for the dryad now. I’m making animations for when the dryad takes damage, dies and respawns. Even though I thought I made the design fairly simple, it’s still difficult and takes a lot of time to make it look good.  |
