Getting Started
RoutinesSo I’m going to write a blog post every week from now, narrating my progress in my university program. I’ve never written a blog before, nor have I been able to follow a routine other than brushing my teeth every night and day. So this might prove to be a challenge for future me, though I am slightly excited about it. The instructions given to us (within the program) was to write a blog post every thursday, containing atleast 400 words and a picture. And the purpose of my blog is to share my work progress aswell as teaching other students my methods and tricks. Space shooterSo here’s the fun part. I’m going to be writing about my current project, the space shooter. I’m working in a group of six people and our task is to create a “space shooter” type game, based on the design document given to us. Our current project is called “Gevena Lost”. It’s a post apocalyptic game (cliché, i know) set in stockholm. You play as Alex, a soldier who’s fallen victim to involuntary military experiments causing her dna to mutate and somehow granting her superhuman powers. Using theese powers, aswell as the help from a contact on the “inside”, you will fight your way to freedom. But it’s not going to easy, as stockholm is flooding with hordes of mutants controlled by the military. So buckle up, grab your gun and get moving. Good luck! RolesMy current role, in the design team, is artist and animator. Animation is probably the only strong advantage I have at the moment, seeing as I have prior experience of it. And when it comes to drawing I’m mediocre, but I have noticed a drastic improvement of my skills since i started the program. So I will try my best to share what little i know with you. Who knows, maybe you’ll learn a thing or two? The CrawlerStarting on a new project is often exciting, you get all of theese ideas of what the finished project could be. So you sit down and start daydreaming about various elements of the game, everythings fun and games until you realize that you actually have to sit down work for once. So in the design document of the game we’re developing (Geneva Lost) there’s an enemy called the crawler. It’s supposed to be some kind of mutated creature that runs on all four. So as a self-proclaimed animator I decided to make a mock-up animation of it, so that i could get a basic overview of what the finished animation would look like. And suprisingly enough the animation ended up looking pretty creepy.
After creating this skeleton and adjusting it after my preferences I started to add some “flesh” on it. Using photoshop as a tool for this was a huge hassle, and I’ve almost spent 9 hours on it, and it’s still not finished! But either way here’s the current animation. And yes, it’s missing a head. The difficulties I had with creating this animation was photoshop. Using photoshop’s timeline was both confusing and time consuming. But I’ve gotten a hang of it now, and i’m sure that I can use a more efficient way of animating in the future. //Edit
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The methods i used to create this were pretty simple, and they make a lot of difference in the end product. I used something called a “line of action” to define where the limbs would move. Using a line of action is beneficial because your animation end up looking a lot smoother than without one. It’s important, however, that you follow the line of action strictly when animating, otherwise there’s no point of using one.
