Blog week 1 – Damage animation
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This is an animation for our game Trowl, a game that is about an owlmother who has built a nest on a train that one day starts rushing. With all of her children scattered around the train, she quickly has to start trying to find them. On the way, everything from predatory birds to dangers in her environment will try to make life harder for her. Two of the obstacles she’ll have to face are thunderclouds on the top of the screen and electricity lines that hang above the train on the lower end of the screen. These will, upon contact, electrocute the poor owl and this is the animation that’ll play out whenever that happens. Obviously I took alot of inspiration from cartoons when making this. Electrocution is a very horrible thing to bear witness to in real life but cartoons has always been good in making it a bit comical. While our game is alot about stress and pressure on the player in finding the owlets before the time runs out, we don’t want it to be a cruel or graphic game. I suppose I could have gone the whole route of making the sprite blink with it’s little owl-skeleton showing through, but I didn’t want it to be TOO goofy either. This is a good middleground I think. The animation is pretty simple, there are three frames of animation that are going back and forth to create a fast and hard effect, drawing the body in a way wich makes it all distorted and pointy. I did hold back a bit the first time I tried it, but it just didn’t become fluid enough and looked really stale. I think I underestimated that even though the animation is supposed to be choppy in a certain way, the frames still has to go into one another to make it look good. So, I made it more excessive and tried to focus on leaving no area non-animated, creating movement on the whole sprite.
In the same category of work, I’ll call it ”damaged sprite”-work, I also created a death-animation. Also pretty simple, using four different sprites and spreading them out during 22 frames of animation. And It’s one that I’ll probably touch up a bit later, but the whole slow to fast falling-animation is one that’s essential to give the character some weight, usually used in fighting-games where the game slows down at the knockout and then speeds up as the body hits the floor. As with the electrocution-animation I didn’t want to make the death-animation overly cruel or graphic, more something that will make the player feel defeated. It’s harder to see in motion, but the last sprite in the animation looks so sad and beaten, and that’s the more or less the point of it.  |
