Green Warden: Week 6 – Iterating dryad animations
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This is the first week after the ALPHA presentation! I have to say, I am impressed with what every group has so far. I think everyone is doing great work and I also think people need to remind themselves this is the very first game we have made. That is pretty amazing! Before the ALPHA I had made the first versions of all the animations needed for the player character, the dryad. We got some feedback during the presentation and now it is time to iterate. Right now, I am in the type of mood where nothing I make is good enough for me. In a way, this is good, because it forces me to always push myself in order to make things better, but at the same time it can be very frustrating for obvious reasons. One of the things I have been working on this week is the taking damage animation for the dryad. Since the dryad has no offensive abilities (besides a power-up) I imagine this animation will have to be played quite a lot during the game. This is the first version I did, before the ALPHA:
As you can see, it is pretty stiff and lacks emotion. I do not think I manage to convey the feeling of the dryad being hurt or in pain. He simply flinches a bit and closes his eyes. He is actually frowning a bit too, but it does not show because of the small resolution. I talked more about how I make the animations for the dryad here. I wanted to make the animation more dynamic and to make it a way for the player to immediately understand that something bad is happening. The finished game will (hopefully!) have a health bar as well as audio feedback to increase the feeling that something is going wrong, but I still want the animation to convey this on its own! This is the second version of the dryad taking damage animation I did:
This one is less stiff, I think! Here the dryad recoils more visibly. I have added a glow around him as well; this is something we discussed to make him stand out more from the background. I still do not quite like the way this one turned out, though. This is the third version I did:
I forgot the glow on this one, but it is supposed to be there. It is a work in progress! Here he is flailing his arms a bit more and bending his head to give more life to the animation. I still do not like it, unfortunately. I am starting to suspect that the pattern on the character is making this more difficult for me. Since it is static, it is difficult to make the animation dynamic enough. What makes it even worse is that trying to move and change the pattern frame by frame while making an animation might end up a disaster. Plus, I have not done that on any of the other animations and it would probably look out of place. I have been staring at this animation for hours now and my brain is starting to hurt. Yet another problem I just thought of is that the animation is probably too slow. Perhaps speeding it up will solve my problems. If the taking damage animation only plays over a fraction of a second, most people probably will not pay too much attention to it and it can get away with looking a bit odd. That is really the only solution I can think of right now. Sigh.  |
