Weekly assignment #2 Enemy Character animations.
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Greetings you all! So we are two weeks in to our blog assignment, and that means another blog post! I am going to tell you all about what I have been doing this week, and how i did it, why i did it. I was assigned to do the walk cycle (walking animations) of our enemy character. Since its for the alpha version this is just a draft, and not a finished version, so it will not be perfect. First of all a walk cycle is a collection of pictures that together creates a walking animations if played fast after another. This is how you animate, and you put it all together in a sprite sheet, which is a picture with all the different moves of the character that creates the illusion of walking. I had to make the walk cycle in 4 directions;
Here is a sprite sheet with my East and West walk cycle.
<- West
<- East
As you can see right here I have made a character that exaggerate its step. By creating this illusion it gives the player the sense that the character really is walking. This is very common in disney movies and animated movies overall. Exaggerate is key in giving the beholder a good feeling about what is happening in front of him or her. The reason this will be changed to the beta is because I wanna exaggerate even more. I want the enemy character to have some what of a hunched back, to give the illusion that he is chasing something and is concentrated. Right now I am happy with the movement, but the posture and the back is too straight, and that doesn’t give the player the sense of a young boy working hard at his summer job. To me its more like how someone from a royal family would walk. Here is a result of the animation!
<- East walk animation
<- West walk animation
So what I am going to focus on for the beta version of the game is to make the walk cycle more exaggerated to give the walk a more neutral feeling in perspective to the game, and to succeed with that I am going to exaggerate. To finish this post up I just want to explain to you what I mean by exaggeration, if you still have no clue what I am talking about. First look at this picture!
This is a walk cycle that will turn in to an animation of a chef sneaking around. Now look at the different poses. The second one would make him fall, the third is dangerously bending his back in an uncomfortable position, the fifth pose is only a handful of people in the world that can do, and again the final one would make him fall. This is far from the most practical way to sneak around, but we dont have to hesitate. We know that he is sneaking around, by the very exaggerated poses, and it also gives us the feeling they want us to feel. Exaggeration is key in trying to tell the player something.
Take care of yourselves, See you next week! Adam  |
