Animations and life

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde

What is life without motion? What is motion without joy? What is joy without soul?

In the beginning of development to our game (http://lindermeister.wordpress.com/2014/02/01/week-2-of-game-development/) we didn’t lay so much emphasize on animation. Me personally thought that as it was a top down shooter, animation would come in fourth place as it isn’t very detailed animations you can do. We don’t have those awesome roundhousekicks or the amazing jumps that you can see in certain games. We only have three animations. Walk, Shoot and Die.

As we only want our bandits to have these animations so have I been working on our bandit 3′s walk and shoot animation. Besides this, so have I been working on our lotus flower that will act as an death animation for all our bandits, more on this later.

I started with the walk animation, this was an easy one. I only really did two things.

First I took the original sprite of the bandit and rotated it a bit to the right, giving it that wiggling feel of a character walking. Then i just added a little bit of a left foot, giving the illusion that our bandit had taken one step forward.

The second one was a bit more trickier and I went through many ideas before I settled with the final result.

My first envision of the animation was that our bandit was going to get on her right knee and aim before shooting. I tried and tried to get the right thigh to look and feel like it had some weight. But after many tries and many more disappointments I abandoned the idea and went for another. I felt that I didn’t achieve the natural motion of a human kneeling down.

This was the result that I came up with. I’m not happy with how the right leg just pops up out of nowhere

Now I envisioned her firing the sniper and from the knockback she would had to adjust herself with a slight rotation to the gun. Giving the feeling of a powerful weapon being shot.

I started with dividing up the Sprite into different parts to easier animate it. The parts where LeftArm, RightArm, Head and Gun. I thought that this would give me an easy layup for the animation. But I underestimated the difficulty of animation and I couldn’t get a good rotation without destroying the sprite too much leaving holes in it. So back to the drawing board and a new vision for the shooting Animation.

Now I went with a very basic shooting animation as that is my current skill. I used the divided sprite and pushed the right side of the sprite and the left underarm back, giving the sprite a knockback. The n added in Viktor Myhrbergs muzzleflash. This was the result:

This is an easy animation but it does have that heaviness to the gun that makes the sprite come to life.

We had our pre-beta meeting today with Marcus, our teacher, and he gave us some grateful tips on how to do the game more interesting. He came up with that on killing an enemy there should be a lotus growing from the body giving the game a surreal feeling to it. We liked it and I took the task on designing this.

I went with a Lotus flower that I believe is a key symbol of Indian culture. I want it to enclose the bandit body and then disappear with the body to the ground. This is what I came up with and know I have the animation left to do on it.

It has three stages. FullyOpen, BaseFlowersOpen and FullyEnclosed. The way I did it was that I started with a circle and then in it I came up with the flowers shapes, then some shading to it on another layer and last the color on its own layer. I had great fun designing this and I’m very happy with the result.

So what is a sprite without its animation, without its joy? It lacks a soul. It lacks that natural thing of motion and joy. That one thing that brings everything to life. Sure we can make awesome sprites and it looks cool and all but without an animation it lacks a soul. Even when standing still a sprite needs to move. It needs to distribute weight to get that lifelike feeling to it. It needs motion. I understand that now and animation is not a thing that I will overlook in future projects. I will train my skills on animation and I will be better. Because without animation a game lacks a piece of its soul.

Yours sincerely, Oskar Månsson, Producer, Boreal Entertainment