BGP – Scrap Pirates – Week 3

For the third week of the Big Game Project, I’ve been finishing and saving the main rough animations for the first player character as sprite sheets, as well as begun cleaning some of the animation. I spent a bit longer than expected with the shoot-animation, though it turned out very simple in the end (only being two frames long). I did a couple of different tests with the character holding his arms in different positions to see what felt and looked best, and discussed it with the other graphical artists. After some thinking and testing, for example with the character holding his shoot-arm with the other hand, we decided that we wanted the character to lift only one arm, keeping the other relaxed by his side in the same way as in the idle-stance. This kept the silhouette of the character clear and easy to read, compared to him covering his chest with one of the arm. I wish that I’d saved some of the other tests of the shoot-animation, but I accidentaly saved over the file. I need to remember not to save when I shouldn’t (and to save often when I should. I keep forgetting to save for long spells of time. Never forget to save your project!)

Other than working on the character animations, I also made a test animation for the magnetic fields that the characters will be using in the game to move around and solve puzzles. We haven’t had a completely clear view of exactly how we want the magnetic fields to look, so at first I was considering trying to make some sort of particle animation for this. After looking at a couple of different inspirations for the fields however, I decided to try another approach, which would, if we feel that it works with the rest of the game when we implement and test it, save a lot of time. Instead of creating a frame by frame animation from scratch, this method uses a tiling texture (that I created with Adobe Photoshop’s “Difference Clouds” effect) that I then used to make this moving shimmer on the surface of the fields.

More updates to come!

Cheers!

/MPh