Game development week 4 – Power-ups
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Although there is still a couple of animations left to do for the main character I thought that I might as well switch it up a bit and include some other types of assets for this week, just for the sake of variation. So among other things, I have been working on the sprites and animations for the different power-up pickups we have got in our game which are: Power-shot (Red) – Arrow continues through the enemy and can hit other enemies. Rain of Arrows (Green) – Sort of a screen clearer, when activated a horde of arrows come raining down killing all the enemies on the screen. Rapid Fire (Orange) – Lowers ”cool down” between shots when activated. Player is able to shoot arrows in a faster rate. Speed up (Purple) – Player moves faster for a short amount of time when activated.
As usual, I went into Aseprite to both draw and animate them. I used different layers much like in Photoshop which made the job a lot more easier and faster to do. I basically seperated the transparent bubble, the icon, the small pixel particles and the aura/shiny effect into their own individual layers. So first I animated the bubble as well as the pretty effects around it such as the particles floating upwards or the aura effect since all the power-ups are gonna have the same kind of animation. When animating I usually just sort of progressively create more frames until I’m done and then I might cut down on them if there is too many but that happens very rarely. The only thing that would be different between all the power-ups is the icon itself showing what kind of power or ability you actually get when picking it up, so I simply made another layer beneath all the other ones and made one at the time. Whilst drawing them out I had to make the icon as clear as possible, explaining what the power is, which could be quite difficult. After I managed to get one icon done I exported the animation as a sprite sheet then it was just basically rinse and repeat for the rest of them.
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