Week 7 – Bursting bubble

Week seven is nearly over and this week I have been working on even more sprites.

In our version of the game Magic Writer we decided to design a bubble where the items the magician is about to throw will spawn. So as soon as the player has decided and successfully typed in the word for one of the three items showed, this item will end up in the magic bubble. As soon as the item appears in the bubble the magician can throw it on the monsters, with the item inside it. So consequently, I have this week been working on a sprite for when our wizards magic bubble bursts when hitting a monster.

As for the earlier sprites I’ve been working on, I also created this sprite in Photoshop. When staring with the frames for the sprite I used a bubble our artist and producer Danielle had already designed. We had slightly different views from the start of what kind of bubble this was going to be. I imagined it being like a soap bubble while other members of our group thought of it more like some sort of a glass ball.

I found this sprite being quite difficult to illustrate and make it look right. I tried my way forward but most of the sprites i made didn’t look right or didn’t match the art style for the rest of our game. I didn’t know how to tackle it at all from the start and where to being animating it. I looked at different videos of soap bubbles bursting in slow motion to get an idea of how it actually looks and how to simplify it.

For the first attempt, I focused more on the bubble being magic and tried making it explode in a cloud of sparkles instead of water drops. I made it quite rough just to get a picture of how it could look. Neither me or my group members was entirely satisfied with of the result and therefore I moved on and tried instead to visualize the bubble being made of glass, so when the bubble would hit the monster it would break in an explosion of glass fragments. So by cutting small pieces of the bubble and moving them around i tried to illustrate the explosion of glass pieces flying.
But this sprite didn’t feel right either and none of us thought it matched the rest of our art. So once again I sat down to try and work it out. My team though I should try and add line art to it since it’s quite transparent. So for my third attempt I made a quick line art for the second sprite and also made a third one where the bubble would just disappear like it was made of smoke or a cloud. I wasn’t too happy with the result of this one either, and to me it looked more like burning paper or like the bubble corroded.

I still haven’t got response from all of our team, but our producer thought the second sprite with line art could work. The line art gave the bubble more clarity and matched the rest of our art style better since more or less everything else in the game have line art.

I am still working on the sprite since it is quite roughly made it still needs some fixing. Ideas how to improve or change the bubble to it’s better are more than welcome! 🙂

About Lisa Ramel

2014  Graphics

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