Game Development process week 4
|
We are now a couple of weeks in in the development process of our game and so far we have come quite a long way. At the moment we have a game that is playable with the character able to shoot a harmless alien to win and if the players touches the alien the player loses the game. This last week I have been working on some of the sprites for the game but the one I am going to talk about this week is the sprite for enemy type 2. This is the more powerful of the two aliens and it is supposed to have a long tongue that either drags the player towards it or just harms the player from a distance. When we started working on this game we based it on a concept that another group made last autumn. In their concept they made a slimey looking thing that was supposed to be the more powerful of the two aliens they had in their project. Down below you can see how they imagined it.
When i designed our alien type 2 I tried to keep the things that was on the side of the prototype alien. I imagined that they were some jelly looking things and that the alien used them to kind of swim in the ship like a jellyfish swims in the water. My first attempt at this looked like this.
The problem here is that the head looks a bit misplaced and does not really belong to the body. First i tried to solve this by letting the head move a little bit more in the animated gifs I made but it still looked more cuddly than scary and intimidating. So the solution to this was to simply remove the head and move the eyes to the body of the alien making a result that looks like this.
The reason the second gif is smaller is because that this gif is the size that we are going to use in the game. This second attempt looks a lot more scary and more uniform than the first version. As it looks now I think it could work but it would look a lot better with a few more details on it. But at the same time I do not really know how much details you can put on a picture that is this small and keep it clear to what it is when the player rushes past them in the game. In this process of making the images I have used Photoshop to create all parts of the alien including the animation. The problem with this is that Photoshop is not designed to create animations and that is still a long and slow process. This could of course just be my own lack of knowledge of Photoshop but I still think that there must be a better program to animate the movements of a character. If I get the time I will sit down with flash to see if that program is easier to animate in. Tagged: Alien, aliens, concept, game development, space-shooter, sprite  |
