Blog Week 4: Boss falls and arms
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This sprint I’ve been working on the last of three attacks for the boss, three is always one of those perfect numbers. This artifact I guess is actually two different parts, but they’re a part of the same set so I’m going to count them as one. The animation starts with the boss jumping up a bit and then bluntly put, falls on his bum. This indicates the attack is about to commence. The animation itself was actually pretty simple, I used Photoshop for it as usual and since I had all of the elements already on separate layers I could move all of the pieces however I wanted them to. For this sprite I just moved the jaw and head down around 10 pixels for each of the frames until the “ground” is reached. After that I just had to fill in the blanks where the tubes are supposed to connect and since it followed a pattern it was easy to expand. The attack isn’t actually coming from where the boss is standing, but from the sides in the form of giant arms. This won’t be the first time the player will see them either as they will appear every now and then on the normal stage. As the arms from the sides are separate from the actual boss body I wanted to make it clear that the body and the arms on the actual sprite now are disconnected giving the player a heads-up on what is about to come. The reason for why this attack is necessary has gone full circle. At first we wanted trees falling down from the sides of the screen in order to keep the player form staying in the same spot all the time. For the boss’s attack pattern we wanted to implement this as well but in a slightly different form and this we came up with the idea of the arms which would sere the same function but would act slightly different, but at this point the player should already have learnt to stay away from things coming from the sides. Unfortunately due to time constraints we had to cut (no pun intended) the trees. But we decided to keep the arm attack and just decided to have them appear during the level instead, hence the full circle. Now for the arms that will show up from the sides, they caused me a fair share of issues. Due to the fact that the arms are supposed to be able to reach horizontally over the screen the sprites for this needed to be big, we set it to 512 pixels as that would mean half the screen. Making sure that every pixel was perfectly aligned took quite some time. Also did figuring out how the hands were going to look like, as the hands on the boss are box shaped they lost a lot of form and I had to really spend time thinking about how the fingers and joints are connected. Once I finally got them too look decent we stumbled up on a problem. The arms didn’t look like pixel art, they had lost their charm.
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