Project “Bloody Badgers” 2014-02-13

As the big project during our Game development course we are to create a game from a chosen concept out of the 13 made concepts from last term. My group chose a concept called “Bloody Badgers”.  It was a game about being chased by a hoard of badgers and you as a player had to dig your way through tunnels to safety.

“Bloody badgers” was all about being chased, and being chased isn’t really a pleasant feeling now is it? So me and my group wanted to make a game that emphasizes on the horrible and terrible feeling of being chased. What better way to do so than to make it into a horror game? Right then and there we also decided to scrap the badgers since we didn’t find them scary and play more on nightmares and what we are most afraid of.

To make a long story short we all agreed on that we want to make a game that is set in a 19^th century dark cellar where you as a player is in a nightmare and have to stay alive for as long as possible while you are constantly being chased by a big monster.

During the first week of the project I was working on the concept for the player in the game. Here is the final concept for the player to give you guys an idea what the player is supposed to look like.

Since the game is set in the 19^th century during the hours of the night I created a character with a long nightgown and a long sleeping cap. The character is also carrying a candle as its only light source.

Here is the player from a top down point of view.

During this week I have been working on the walk cycle of the player. Since I’m not familiar with animating at all I really had to go through a crash course in animating. Thankfully Jonna ( moonphanter.wordpress.com ), the lead artist of our group, have studied animation for 3 years before and therefore was a great source of help during this process. Of course I’ve made a lot of rookie mistakes that have made my job so much harder than it could have been but at least I’m learning.

For my animation I’m using the timeline tool in Photoshop CS6. The first mistake I made was that I used my created player sprite as a template throughout the animation. This resulted in me having to cut, move, push and pull parts of the player to fit the animation I wanted to have. I also had to patch up the connecting parts after I moved, for example, the arms around. I later learned that you save so much more time drawing an animation sketch of how you want your animation to look like beforehand and then fleshing it out. It is a lot easier to tug and pull a simple sketch to the pose you want and afterwards patching it up than it is to do the same to an already fleshed out character without making it look noticeably patched up.

Anyways, here is the animation I’ve been working on. As you can see I’m not completely done with it, I still have to polish up the right arm and the legs, make so the head moves seperatly from the shoulders and make the sleeping cap move as well.

I’m really excited to get to explore the world of animation and I’m looking forward to all the knowledge I have yet to explore.