Animations!
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Entry Journal 2018/02/15
Today’s topic is about the animations that were made for Aetherial, the game that me and my group are developing. In this week’s sprint planning we went over the milestones that had to be reached before the Alpha Presentation deadline on Thursday, as well as the crucial requirements that the game has to fulfill in order to consider it successful, once of which was the power up ability. In the case of Aetherial, this attribute meant that the player was able to dash from one spot to another on the screen in order to dodge the incoming projectiles. The meeting concluded with the goals set up to implement animations to clearly convey the idea of teleportation and give more dynamics to the gameplay. As suggested by the concept document, the ship that the player controls throughout the game runs on a magical power source called Aether. This allows it to spawn portals that can be used to dash from one location to another. Being the graphic artist in charge of the player avatar, I had to come up with an unique vision of how this teleportation was going to look like. For this process, I wanted to add a cartoony motion to the ship, through the squash and stretch technique, but also to make it look more lively. In my view, the ship would prepare for the jump into the portal much as a rabbit does before doing a hop. This was the first animation test and it was made using ‘Autodesk Sketchbook’. The squash and stretch motion was achieved by using the transformation tool that the software provides. What I did was basically copying the sprite on to several frames and morphing its shape. I considered it to be easier than drawing/painting the ship on every single frame, which would have resulted in a quality loss throughout the process. The animation in question consists of 28 frames. However, due to my lack of experience, the final result did not prove to be what I had expected and no matter how many times I tried my vision could not be replicated into the animation. The reason why the animation is not finalized and no other effects were added is because I have decided to put this idea on hold for the moment. I have still sent it out to my team mates to find out how they feel about it and it turned out they were quite happy with it. My view for the dash mechanic made it possible for the player to dash only forward. Nonetheless, after playtesting the games for several days, the group concluded that allowing the ship to dash in multiple directions would be a better game mechanic and give the player more agility in the face of danger. Obviously, the previous animation that I had done would have not been suitable for this new implemented mechanic so I started working on a new one.
This time the animation did not confine the dash to one single direction. The ship could disappear and spawn into other place. Using the transformation tool I gradually shrunk the sprite size on every single frame (30 in total) and drew the smoke effects over it on a separate layer. The duration of the dash had to be maximum one second in order not to cause frustration for the player, so I exported the animation with the speed of 30 frames per second. The result was highly appreciated by the group but, unfortunately, did not make it into the final appearance at the Alpha Presentation due to some problems that occurred in the Unity build. And that was it for today’s entry journal. Until next week, take care and have a great weekend! Bye!  |
