Blog1
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Sharks The goal of this post is to present and reflect on the process I went through when beginning to design and animate the movement of the shark enemy for our game. So how does a shark look like? Well that depends. There are many different kinds of sharks and they all look different. So the first thing I did was to research which types of sharks that were common in the seas surrounding Japan. I decided to go with the great white since it is not only one of the most well known sharks, but it also is quite common around Japan. It is also large enough to potentially cause damage to a boat of the size we decided on.
Next on was how to draw it. Most of us have seen a shark in our life, even if it’s just in a picture or from a movie. However a lot of the time these pictures are from straight ahead or the side, for our game I need to know how the sharks’ silhouette looks like from above. After that the problem was how to make it look threatening and also look interesting. Since this will be the first and most common enemy it is very important that it looks interesting, since the player will see it more than the others. The design I came up with is making the shark wider and a bit more “pointy” to give it a unique shape while still having a similar core shape to all of the other enemies and objects that we will implement later.
This asset however is mostly to be used as a reference for the size and shape of the shark animation. The asset itself will not be used in the final game as is is still, and sharks can not stay still for more than a moment since they need to move in order to breathe.
What could be interesting to note is just how much the shark’s tail moves and how that movement affects the rest of the body. In the picture above you can see the extreme-pose where the fin is as far to the right as possible. This pose would then be mirrored for the left side. It is also important to note that the fin has its own movement that is following after the main part of the tail, so it will always move in the way the tail did a few frames earlier.  |
