Week 8: Real Archers Have Jelly Arms.
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Hello! This week we’re rounding up the very last things to do before our Beta presentation on friday. It’s mainly a lot of pressure on our programmers, but they are getting along fine right now, and everything is turning towards us having a nice, nearly complete game to show. Initially I was supposed to finish the very last attack animation for the last tree / tower (you can read more about my Tower Attack Animations in my previous blog post “Week 7: Even More Animating”). However, after a meeting with our group I was put in charge of completing all the animations for the archer, the only ranged enemy in the game. Even so, I still decided to give it a try with the last tree. However, the result was horrendous, and our lead artist took it upon himself to try an animate it. I won’t post my result here, as I fear the quality of my blog would deteriorate even further. If that is at all possible. So, I started animating the archer yesterday morning. This time there is no deeper meaning behind my work, so I’ll only go into the technical stuff. I started with animating his walk cycle. Since the enemies only move in 4 directions (up, down, left, right), compared to the player character who can move in 8 directions (diagonals included), I had to make walking cycles in 4 different directions. First idea is to just mirror either the left or right walking cycle to cut down on the work. I did not think of this, and simply added another hour and a half, to two hours of work. I used Photoshop once again to animate the character. I started out witht the idle sprite of the enemy (ell enemies were designed and drawn by our lead artist Nisse):
This image is 64×64 pixels, it’s the actual size of the enmy in the game. When animating it I simply zoomed in on it a bit. This resulted in a very pixelated, blocky look of the character. Once I had the initial sprite, I copied it over once, so that I had a copy of the character for the first frame. I then made another layer in Photoshop so I could draw over the image without messing up the original sprite. I used this layer to sketch the movement for the characters legs. Once I had a basic sketch down, I made another fgrame, copied over the sprite and sketched layer, and then re-did the sketch so it would fit in the animation sequence. I did this 6 times for 6 frames. Then, I added another layer to each frame, where I did the arms. Once the sketches were done for each frame, I erased parts of the original image and filled in the sketch with colors. The final result was this:
Right now the animations is playing with 1 frame every 0.1 seconds, which in my opinion is a tad bit too fast. This is the process I used for all directions, as well as the attack animations. Walking Animations:
Attack animations:
As you may already have noticed, the archers arms in some of the walking animations look as if they are made of jelly. This was definitely intended, and not something I missed until the very last frame of animating. The main difference between the attack and walking animations is that the attack animations have 8 frames instead of 6. However, I used the same technique for both when animating them. That concludes week 8 for now. On friday is our beta presentation, and hopefully all will go well. //Holm  |
