Keep on running

Continuing last week’s work I came up with a menu style which we felt fit our vision of how the menu should look. This design has a much less complex and more discrete logo design. Joining all the components of the menu together with ropes gives, at least for me, a feeling of a playground with home built swings and tree houses. The font chosen for this design is Segoe Marker. I chose it because it makes the text look a bit hand drawn. 

I have been working more on the animations this week. I started off by re-animate the male character; I moved the legs closer together and added a bobbing effect to his torso to make it look like he is putting his weight on the front leg. I applied the same type of animation to the female player character but changed the color for the shoes to red. I also changed the direction her left foot points to make it look like her feet are pointing more forward instead of sideways; I will do this with the male character as well later on.

The male character will be re-designed by Viktor so that his style goes better together with the rest of the sprites. Viktor will also shade the legs to give them more depth.

My work continued with the walking animations for the children. I found it to be a bit tricky to get the animations to where I wanted them. I wanted the children’s bodies to rotate a little bit in each frame to get the feeling that they actually are moving their bodies but when I tried to rotate the torso in one frame Photoshop decided that the rotation would apply for all the frames. So, I had to find another solution for the rotation and it ended up being a kind of clunky solution; by making a number of duplicates of the torso and turn them each a little bit and make each duplicate only visible in a specific frame I manged to get the result I wanted.

For the children on the tricycle I am having a wee problem with getting some life into the animation. I have animated the feet and they look pretty decent but I want to add even more movement to their bodies. I am going to add some bobbing to the body of the child doing the cycling so he does not look as stiff as he does now. I was thinking of adding some wind to the animation and make the girl’s piggy-tails flutter in the wind. I will also add something to the wheels to make it look like they are spinning. I do not want to do too much though since I am afraid it will get a bit messy.
 

Coming up for me now is attack/shoot/throw animations and menu button interaction feedback, as well as other feedback elements such as steam emitting from the gun as it gets overheated.

Andreas