Blog week one: The player dies.
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Hey! My name is Marcus and I’m working on a top down “space” shooter with my team. The game is about a soldier that is experimented on by the military, to try and make a super soldier with mutant powers. There have been many failures with the experiments resulting in some strange creations. Some people don’t even look like humans any more, and have become four legged killing machines. Our main character is the first stable specimen, keeping his/her human form and mind. During the game the protagonist flees from the military and is chased by soldiers and the failed experiments. One of my tasks this week was to finish the death animation of our protagonist. As I’ve never animated prior to this project, it required some iteration. Learning from previous animations I’ve done for the game, and some advice from Simon in our team, I started out with two rough sketches to get the general idea down. Earlier, with the walking animation, I just made a top down sprite of the player and then started animating it   So, one falling backwards and one falling forwards. I found one big problem with both of these: they were too smooth. Smooth as in it looks like the character falls at the same speed throughout the entire sequence, which makes it look stiff. I was not entirely happy with the way the character fell either. It looks boring.
I decided to iterate on sketch #2. I started with changing the end of the animation, making the character roll over after falling to the ground, and then removed some of the frames in between, to make the fall happen faster:  
This looks a lot more interesting! With the sketch finished I started fleshing the frames out using the player walking animation i created earlier as a base. I also used the lights on the player’s suit to emphasize our players death, and thus the end of the game.
DifficultiesPhotoshop is not ideal for animating. It is cumbersome and unintuitive. When doing frame by frame animation, onion skinning is not available, so I did it by hand by enabling the previous frame and setting it to 50% opacity. Regarding the animation itself though, the camouflage was difficult to put in motion because of the inherent detail. All in all, this particular animation from sketch to finished sequence took me about six hours. Though I did reuse the first frame from my walk sequence.  |
