Blog week 1 – Asteroid animations
|
My name is Malin Runsten Fredriksson and I’m currently working on a 2D space shooter project called ”Space Giraffa”. To summarize the game; it’s about a giraffe called ”Giraffa” who is kidnapped by aliens along with its family to outer space and is heavily experimented on. Luckily she manages to escape and flies towards the enormous army of aliens to find her missing family members. The game is an auto-sidescroller with enemies and obstacles coming in from the right side of the screen. One of the obstacles the player will encounter is asteroids, which assets I am currently responsible for. Last week I created the still-versions of the asteroids which will be spawned in random waves when implemented in the game. This week I had to create the destruction animation for these asteroids, so that they will crumble and blow up when shot by the player.
My prior experience with animation and sprites were pretty much non-existent, so I’d taken on quite a challenge. I was quite proud of my first attempt to animate an explosion, but it ended up looking a bit too realistic in style for the game we’re making. It needed to have a more “cartoonish” feel to it. Then I remembered a lecture we had the other week, and simple little animations we were taught back then. The principle was; “how do I make something really good without using a gigantic number of frames and layers?”. I really liked the way he worked and decided to try it out for myself. Just as I was getting started though, I discussed the idea with one of my teammates and he thought it would be more fitting for our enemy explosions. The asteroids should probably have a more smokier look to them (since it’s basically just hard rock that explodes) he explained and I agreed with him. So where do you go when you’re stuck? Your best friend “Google”! Really, there are so many good references out there. Most of them were too realistic styled, but finally I found one that I could base my animation on. Though I still have a lot of improving to do as far as animations go, I was quite happy with the way it turned out.
On to the next challenge! -Malin Runsten Fredriksson, Group 9
 |
