BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 1-2

Here we go again. After a long spell of burnt out silence I’m dusting of my blog and going back to writing. This time it’s for our last course of the year, and I’ll be writing a weekly post for about 8 to 9 weeks. As the title suggests this post will cover the first two weeks of what’s been going on with our Big Game Project (or BGP for short).

During these weeks we’ll be creating a slice of a bigger game concept, which will be presented at GGC (Gotland Game Conference) in May. I’m part of “Sprocket”, a group of seven people working on a project called “Scrap Pirates”. It’s a 2D metroidvania styled exploration/platformer game with focus on 2-player cooperative gameplay. The players take on the role of two space pirates that, with the use of magnetic abilities, solve puzzles and explore the insides of an old terraforming vessel in search for scraps and valuables.

The first two weeks were mainly spent with Pre-Production work, finishing the Design Document, dividing roles and tasks among the group members and starting working on the basics. I’ll be working as a graphical/animation artist, focusing mainly on character animation for the player-characters, as well as some effect animation.

We’ve chosen to go with a classic frame by frame style of animation for the player-characters, as we feel that it will give more charm to the characters that would have been harder to achieve through bone based animation, though it might require more time to finish.

So far I’ve managed to finish the rough test-animations for the character run cycle, as well as the jump-animation. The most difficult part with getting everything to look right was the perspective of the character. Though the game will be a 2D side-view game, the characters will be viewed slightly from the front instead of in profile.

To get the perspective and movement right, I started with very rough sketch-animations. When the movement and weight of the character felt right, I went onto creating slightly cleaner roughs, to make sure that the character proportions were better, and added in-betweens.

I’ll be continuing work on the animations, creating roughs for idle- and shoot animations, as well as creating a rough magnetic-field effect animation. From there I’ll have to start cleaning some of the roughs before the Alpha stage of our production.

Wish me luck!

Cheers!

/MPh