Game Development Process Week 8
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A new week, a new blogpost! This week has been all about redesigning the Astronaut sprite for the game and trying to follow the critics that we got during last weeks beta presentation. The presentation went pretty well in my opinion even if we did not have assets in the game yet. But the part of the critics that we got was that about the Astronaut. The things that they thought felt wrong with the astronaut was that he did not move at any point in the animations that I had made and there was only the jetpack and the weapon that had any real animations. Down below you can see the old astronaut that was implemented in the game.
This is not a gif so that you can see what is moving but the only parts is the thrusters and a blue light when the weapon is fired. Other things that is wrong with this version is that the left arm is longer than it can be. This is because the astronaut is holding the weapon straight forward instead of alongside his chest as he should if he was a normal person. The reason I made him this way is because the jetpack thrusters is pointing straight backwards and if the astronaut would have held the weapon askew the thrusters would have accelerated him in the wrong direction. Another thing that my drawing teachers said was that many of the lines of the astronaut goes into one another. This can make it hard to see where a part starts and another ends. As is the case where the shoulder bands go down to the backpack and kind floats together. All of these things should have been fixed with the new version of the astronaut I hope. Well judge for yourself.
First of all we have the idle animation. As we see directly there is a lot more happening here than just a static sprite image. Even if the animation is simple, just resizing the astronaut he feels a lot more on edge and alive in my opinion.
The thruster animation is just the thrusters moving as it was in the last version, but there isnt much else that you have time to see on the screen when the astronaut is moving anyway.
And last, the shoot animation. This I think have been very improved since the last version. Now the astronaut is actually moving when the gun fires and we can see that there is a big recoil from the weapon. Something that is not in this gif but the version that is in the game is that the blue stripes on the weapon also turns red when the weapon is cycling back from the recoil. This is to show the player that the weapon can not fire for a short moment. This is the redesign that I have been working on this week and I think that it is a big improvement from the last version that we had in the game. Thats it for this week. Next week I hope that we have a finished game to show you.  |
