Altars done!

Hello again! This week I’ve been working with the Altar and it took a lot longer than I thought. I had a early version of the altar ready that I was working with a bit last week, but it I later noticed this week that the whole perspective of the altar was wrong. This problem was not something that could be fixed with some tweaks, so I had to remake the whole thing.

The sketches I made of the altar.

I started making new altar sketches, constantly asking the team if they agreed with the design, but in the end we decided to make it resemble the original design of the first altar. This part of the artifact took the longest time and effort since I had to repeatedly scrap and remake the altar in order to make it look fitting to the game environment, and after a while I managed to finish the base of the altar. After I was done making the altars base, I started making the glow effect of the signs seen on the altar’s surface, representing the three elements that the character can use, fire, water and wood. Making the glow animation was the easiest to work with, since all I had to do was to move a opacity slider whilst working in the Photoshop timeline.After I made the animation work correctly, I had to put all the frames into a sprite sheet, so that the programmers can put it into the game. Making a sprite sheet is not that difficult. I saved all the separate  frames into .PNG files and put them all in order in  a new file, and finally used a sprite sheet making program to merge them all into one big sprite sheet. In this case I used the software called Glueit. It is a simple and easy to use software, and I highly recommend it to anyone that wants to make sprite sheets. You can download the software here: Glueit.

This is the finished altar with animation and a placeholder background.

I am not completely done with this artifact just yet, I still have to change the size of the sprites a little so that they can fit better into the new resolution play area that we decided to use. This also goes for the previous sprites that I made. This will not be a problem though, I will just have to open them up separately in Photoshop and change their size by a certain percentage. That was all I have been working on this week! Next week I will start working on pictures that will show the player the difference between consuming a lost soul and setting it free. Until next time!