Artifact 5 – Pickups

Eight weeks has now passed since my team 12 and I started the Space Shooter Project “Heartbeat Bat”. The original concept was designed by Team 7. The Alpha is over and we are now heading towards the Beta which will be at the end of this week.

For this week’s blog assignment I thought I would tell you about the different Pickups I have been working on.

Here below you can see and read about the final versions of the different Pickups in the appearance as flying insects. 

Pickup 1 – Blue Firefly
First we have the blue firefly which serves as the general pickup. Once the player has collected an enough amount of these fireflies the avatar bat’s wings will start to sparkle in a blue shine and the player will be able to let out the sonar attack which will clear spiders and cobwebs in front of the player. Stalactites and Gayzers however will remain untouched.

Pickup 2 – Green Toxic Grasshopper
The second pickup is the green toxic grasshopper which serves as a powerup. When the player has collected this powerup it will grant her immunity for a short time to every trap and obstacle in her path except stalactites. (Note: I changed the final version to have white wings since the purple wings smelted in too much in the level environment.)

Pickup 3 – Yellow Speedboost Bug
The third and last pickup is the yellow speedboost bug which will serve as a temporally speedboost in the game. The bat will travel in doubled up speed (x2) for about 5 seconds. So let us say, if the player has the speed 7 the speed will be increased to 14 (7×2=14). However this bug will be kind of a challenge to catch since it will be traveling faster than the other pickups. This design choice was made to make the ability of this powerup be more obvious for the player even before she had catched it and learned about its powers. (Note: I changed the final version to have white wings since the purple wings smelted in too much in the level environment.)

Pickup 4 – Bat Sense Powerup (Cancelled)
The forth pickup was going to be the bat sense powerup. We thought that it would be interesting to have a powerup that showed arrows on the next areas where enemies were going to show. However this feature turned out to be abit too complicated for the programmers to code and we also figured that this powerup would be abit unessesary when we already had two others with powerful abilities.

My first step was to create a fast prototype for the programmers to test in their engines. Here I experimented with different ways to animate the light bulb on the firefly. 

How was this glow effect created? 
First I choose a soft brush with very soft edges and set the opacity to about 50%. On the second frame I added a brush stroke to the already existing bulb. I continued like this until the light was at the highest light level. To make the light fade away I choose the last frame and all the ones I had created before until the glow was gone. I went like this: (frame 1,2,3,4,3,2,1 etc.). This way I did not have to create new frames from scratch to make the light decrease.

The wings I just had 3 different frames for. When the wings were at the front, middle and back position. For every frame I changed the position from the front to the back. Drawing the wings blurry created the illusion of fast moving objects. Well atleast I tried in the prototype.

Here is the result. 

Once I had a slightly idea of how to create the animation the second step was to change the appearence to the firefly. The prototype firefly would not have fitted the visual style in our game. First I created the bright blue firefly and due to time issues we first decided to have them change in color with the Hue/Saturation tool. Later when we decided to scrap the forest and forest top level and only concentrate on the cave level, I found time to create more personal types of the bug powerups. 

The tactic I used to animate the final glow version of the firefly differs from the prototype. Instead of adding and strengthen a glow shine to every frame on the light bulb I only created one glow shine on a seperate layer and duplicated this as many times I needed it. For every new frame I changed the opacity of the glow. 
For eg. Frame: 
[1 = 10% opacity, 2 = 30% opacity, 3 = 50% opacity, 4 = 70% opacity, 5 = 90% opacity, 6 = 70% opacity, 7 = 50% opacity (from here I went back down again with the opacity..)]

I noticed this method of animating glow was much more precise and safe from making mistakes than drawing a new stronger glow shine for each frame which I did for the prototype (which could easily have resulted in drawing outside the lines). 

Different personalities
In order to give the bugs more personality I added blinking eyes and gave them different shapes. The pickup firefly I did not make any other changes on than add a floating motion up and down. 
The toxic green powerup however I changed into an stinking oversized grasshopper which I thought would help the player to understand its purpose better. Since grasshoppers possesses legs I here also added a floating motion up and down and even the legs are moving seperately. 
The last speedboost powerup I gave a slimmer body than the other bugs to indicate its speed purpose aswell. I figured it would have the color of speed which would be a bright color in my oppinion. That was why it got the yellow color closest to white. I added a gloweffect here to make it fit to the other pickups which had some special effects. (Glow on firefly and stink cloud on grasshopper.)  

                                              Here is the final result for the Beta 
                                      which might need a polish before the Final!

Sweet, that will be all for this time guys. The next blogpost is probably going to be the last report for this project since I am starting a new project for the Theme Park course in about two weeks time. The final blogpost is going to be about the creation of the Logos for the Game and for the Team. Stay tuned and thank you for reading!

And remember..
               Time is still of the essence – even though this project is almost finished!