Power Up Animations
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This week I have been working on the animations for our game Trowl. We have three different power ups and we have chosen to animate them. I have learned that making things pop out from the environment and make them actually look like power ups is crucial for the player and the game. I have been working in photoshop with the “frame animation” function. This allows me to animate the icon I have worked on previously. The animation itself works by adding new frames til the animation is visually seamless to our eyes by adding a new layer of the icon. Adding a new layer to each frame is critical to make it look smooth. First runner up is the Stopwatch Power up animation sprite sheet.
First I made a frame animation in photoshop. The width and height of the animation is 90×90 and there are a total of 18 frames. In order for the programmers to use my animation I had to copy every single frame into a new page with the pixels 1620×90, so 90 height and 1620 width. It is the one you can see above. In our scrum meeting I thought this single power up one would take me two hours to animate, but it took closer to four hours. The things I have changed from the icon version of the Stopwatch Power Up are the color of the circle from light blue to magenta, I made the minute clock pointer turn around, I made the clock itself wiggle back and forth and a pulsating pink blob following the circle around. All this to make it pop out from the environment and make the player go “aha! this does not look dangerous and might be a power up!” and it is just a pleasent thing to look at, it is smooth and the clock behaves in a way that is somewhat realistic. The power up itself slows down time in game for a limited amout of time to give the player more time to react to the dangerous predatory birds, trap doors, branches, electrical lines and random things humans throw at the protagonist owl. The clock itself is slightly tilted to make it look more stylish. It is made in pixel art and I am very pleased by the way it turned out in the end. I hope it will be a powerful and useful power up in the game.
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