Game Production: Feature 5
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This week we have been scrambling to get all our artwork done for the beta presentation this friday. So I have been working on a lot of different stuff, mostly animations and effects. So in this blog I’ll describe a few different animation and how I created them. First is the enemy with the big axe, I made walk animations and an attack animation for him. These are the results:
He is supposed to hit all trees in his vicinity so a spinning attack felt like the best option. The hard part about this animation was getting the timing and build up right before the swing. It could use a little more tweaking to be perfect, but I think that in the end it was a decent animation. The next thing I worked on was the death animation for the player character, the Warden. For this animation I took inspiration from the other artwork I did for this character. Using the same kind of green energy or magic that the attack was made of, I imagined the Warden being made of this kind of energy and when she dies she is dissolved into pure energy which is then transported back into the heart tree where she is respawned. This is how it came out: Making good looking fire effects was a fun challenge, it was my first time trying to animate fire and it proved to be quite tricky. First off, trying to make the fire behave realistically I had to try a few times to find the right motion. Then animate flames that leave the fire to fly upwards and fade out and lastly make it all look good repeating, with the first and last frame fitting together. This is what I ended up with:
I’m not very happy with it, but it’ll have to do for now, I might return and improve it for the final version. These animations were all done in photoshop using the frame by frame animation tool. This means that every frame is drawn on a different layer and put in a frame. By toggling the different layers visibility the different frames are shown, creating an animation. This method takes a lot of time, but I think I have increased my animation speed a lot since I began with this project. Both by learning new ways to streamline my process and just by getting used to the programme. This week has been kind of stressful but also a lot of fun, animation is something I think can be really rewarding when you get to see your art come to life in the game.  |
