Game Project – The day of the lost souls

This time I’m gonna talk about lost souls in our game and how I’m working to animate it. The lost souls has a chance to drop from enemies and the player can collect them. Then you have a choice to sacrifice them or free them. When you do you get elemental points which work as health and power-up for the player. You get more if you do the evil choice and sacrifice them. This also affects the players karma in-game. Depending on the players karma he/she will get a different ending to the game. Also if the player sacrifices the lost souls he/she gets more enemies against you. If the player free them he/she get less enemies to battle. But this blog post is not supposed to be about how they work in the game, but how I designed it. I started to draw a lot of thumbnails to try how they could look. Then me and Christoffer in my team and lead artist sat down and choose which to pick. We chose 2 that look kind of similar and then I made new versions of them and we could decide on which to have in the game. To draw them I used the software SAI. Then when it was time to animate it I worked in Photoshop using timeline. I started to make a sketch animation to make the movements and to see how it would work. Here is how it looked, I used 7 frames to make it:

Then I took it into SAI again and drew the outlines for the lost soul on each frame. Then I took it into Photoshop again to see how it looked. Then I had to do some tweaking to make it look good. Here is how it looks with the outlines:

How I wanted it too look was obviously like a ghost as it would be a lost soul but I wanted it too look sad and lonely too. So the sludge like movements of the ghosts aura or what you would call it was made because it would make it look like a ghost and kind of lonely I a way as it was moving. Then for the main body or face of the lost soul and the eyes. I wanted a simple body as it would be small in the game and much details wouldn’t be noticeable. I made the main body or face go down from the top to the side so it would look more sad. Then I placed the eyes far down it as it gives the impression of it being even sadder, just giving it sad eyes wasn’t enough, I had to make it look like it was looking down.

Next I’m going to work on coloring it and adding shadows and highlights to all the frames.