Character sprite sheet
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So first blogpost on the new course and first on the blog as well! Better late than never I suppose. So during the past two weeks sprint planning I took upon making a sprite sheet for our character for our game Magic Writer. By talking and brainstorming back and forth with my group members on how the character could look and move, I sat down and started to work on a sprite sheet. We had a few different ideas of how it could work and I decided to try and make a sprite sheet were our wizard would crab walk across the beach where our game takes place. You will always see the back of the wizard so making him walk horizontal with the back turned to the player, we thought might add a comic touch to it. I haven’t made sprite sheets before, so a lot of time went to just try it out and figure out how to make animations, how to visualize and make the walk look correct. I worked in Photoshop for creating the GIF and drawing up each frame. While making the crab walk sprite I, among other things, looked at Zoidberg from Futurama for inspiration and there from tried to make the sprite for our character. It took quite a lot of time for me to make this sprite, first of all, as mentioned before, that I haven’t done this before and second of all because I found it quite difficult figuring out how I should make the actual move realistic but still goofy since the position of our character is a bit awkward, always viewed from behind and somewhat looking down on him. I eventually managed to make a sprite and during the same week I also made a second sprite for the character, also from one of the ideas we had, to make the wizard teleport himself instead of walking, which would put even more weight on the fact that he actually is a wizard. Since our game also is divided in different lanes which the character can move between, this sprite would make it easy for the character to quickly appear in the right position. I was much happier with the result of this sprite and got good response when showing it to the rest of the team. The negative aspects about it that was reflected on was if it would be bad, visually, with him disappearing in a cloud every time the player move but on the other hand our level will only contain four or five lanes to move between. We haven’t fully decided which one to go with and both of them probably needs some fixing to make them more solid but I feel like we are on the right track anyway!
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