Game development – Introduction: Week 5
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This week (besides reworking the defense-plant unit animation as we were advised to do at our alpha-presentation) I’ve started working on redesigns for the enemies in the game, more specifically the melee enemy and its walk animation. The reason for this is to make them more in line with the style of the game and adjust the designs to better reflect their function. The previous design for the melee enemy was nice but was too close silhouette-wise to the ranged enemy and needed to be “toughened up” a bit. So, the actual drawing methods are the same as the one for the plant units and has been previously described in this blog in the Style Guide. You can find the relevant blog post here. I wanted our melee unit to be heavy-set, brute-ish and short as it is supposed to be a close-range fighter. “Fat but agile” I guess you could call the type. I used the same pattern but overlayed it with some color to better distinguish the clothes from the skin. I also exchanged the gun in the previous design for a melee-weapon, a crude hammer, slung over the shoulder. This version is closer in style to the plant units while still looking distinct enough to not be confused with the friendly side.
I’m fairly satisfied with the design but realized I might have overreached when it was time to animate. Like with the plant units, the animation process involved a lot of “cheating”, free deform, paste-ing in patterns and blending over. Luckily, because the patterns blend together, it still looks fairly cohesive when zoomed out to the correct size. I started off with thinking about what kind of walk I wanted for this character and looked up reference videos of how stocky characters walk on youtube. I decided that it should look both decisive and energetic while still having some weight to it. With that in mind I laid out my keyframes. The trickiest part there was getting the elbow to move correctly, considering how the melee-weapon is carried. I drew in arrows to show how the weight is moving up and down to make it easier to follow. What I forgot to consider while sketching was perspective, that it should be slightly angled down, which makes the sketch look different to the “finished” animation.
Our previous courses and especially the lesson on animation was a great help here, both with picturing the movement in 3D-space and applying animation principles like squash-and-stretch, follow-through and secondary action. So, time for the real animation. Commence the cheating! The first thing I did was separating the different body-parts, upper leg, lower leg, head, torso, upper arm, lower arm, feet, hands. Then I pasted these over the keyframes and made liberal use of free-deform and flipping parts to approximately fit the movements, pasting in patterns to conceal gaps. Other adjustments were for perspective, making the feet and legs smaller.
This is where it is at now. I can’t say I’m all that happy with it, compared to the sketch, a lot of the ease in the movement and the weight was lost and I’d like to fix that if possible, preferably actually working through all frames instead of the way I did it. However with time being of the essence, that will have to do for now.  |
