Finished Player Avatar Animations
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Quck recap of the story of my team’s game before I go into detail about what I’ve been doing for it this week: The name is The Fancy Mansion Heist, and you play as a burglar who’s breaking into the mansion of Mr. Otto von Fancy, to steal his various valuables and money. He stalks you throughout your wandering around the building, shotgun blunderbuss in hand and ready to shoot you the second he hears or sees you. So! This week I’ve been finishing up a bunch of animations, mostly for the player character also known as “the burglar”. So far I’ve gone through several test animations and iterations of the burglar’s design, all which you can see in previous posts here on my blog. What I will be focusing on for today’s post is how I’ve gone about making the final versions of the animations, and what troubles I ran into while doing so.
These are the finished walk animations for the burglar, now featuring slightly darker colours compared to previous versions, shading and highlights, and blinking eyes, to bring in slightly more life into an otherwise fairly plain animation. Here are also the animations/images for the idle position:
And for the curious, here’s a sprite sheet featuring the 28 frames used in one of the animations:
It’s a basic 14 frame walk animation, duplicated and with the first three frames in the second 14-part group edited to feature the blinking. This to prevent the burglar from blinking every step they take, which seemed far too rushed and unnatural. So what were the troubles I ran into while drawing these out? For one, figuring out how to go about things in the most time efficient manner possible was a hassle, especially with the numerous revisions and iterations of the design and animations I had to do. My original idea was to only add shadows to the leg and arm behind the body, but the result was still too flat and did not match the rest of the game’s visual aspects. So upon request from my team members, I buckled up and added shading and highlights to various part of the body, still keeping it fairly simple so it would not require too much time to animate. Secondly, I was working around the clock on these to manage the looming deadline of the Beta presentation we have tomorrow (Friday, 13th) and thus I was working while sleep deprived. This was not the best choice (but what other option were there?) as I ended up drawing the legs wrong on the back view animation. This I didn’t notice until the lines had been drawn out, and the result looked like the burglar was locked in place and only kicking their legs back repeatedly. Frustrated, I tried to salvage what I could to save time, minimizing the frames I had to re-draw. This ended up as a less than satisfactory animation with some jittery lines I’d be glad to edit, if the time was available for something like that. As it stands, the result is still decent enough to use, and most mistakes won’t be as noticeable in the actual game where the character moves through the various rooms of the mansion. Still, it’s a frustrating mistake to make, and one I’ll be sure to avoid in future projects. Other that that, I’m fairly pleased with how things are progressing so far. Everything visual is matching up far better by now compared to earlier versions, and my team and I are working hard everyday to put this game together. To round this post up, here are a couple of screenshots of how the overall game is looking so far:
Without the black-out parts of the screen, to give an idea of how everything is laid out, and
with the mostly blacked out screen. This will be what the player sees for the most of the game. See you folks again next week! /Addis  |
