Week 5 – Tsunami
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During this week I have been working on several smaller artifacts and I’m sorry to say that none of them are completely done. But one of them is the tsunami that will appear in the game and it’s the one that is closest to be done. It haven’t been tested in game yet and is why I’m calling it not done. The tsunami will move from the top of the screen towards the bottom and will be as wide or even wider than the game area. This will force the player to use the shield in the game to avoid taking damage. The earlier prototypes/concepts of the tsunami was kind of transparent and faded both at the start and end(top and bottom) of the animation. This made the hitbox-position very unclear and the player didn’t know when the shield had to be active or when it could be deactivated to avoid damage. Because water is kind of transparent this caused some problems for me since it didn’t feel like water when it was no transparency. Also since our perspective is top-down in the game(the sprites and background give the illusion that the perspective is somewhat tilted though) it was hard to imagine and capture the feeling of a wave form that perspective. But I did my best and had some help from my friend google and found some reference pictures to work from.
What I found out from looking at some pictures of waves is that the front of the wave(when broken) is almost completely white and the wave have a steep arc shape after the white foam in the front. I tried to capture these two elements of the wave since I felt its the things we associate with a wave the most. But this was easier said than done and I had no idea how to make the wave as short as it had to be and look big in the same way. It would have been much easier to draw it in profile but that would have looked ridiculous so I put down a few hours and made and remade it a few times until I was somewhat satisfied with the result. It started of slow but after a few tries it started to take shape and I experimented with a few tools,mainly the mixer-brush and the burn-tool, and they really helped with the final touch. The burn-tool made the water look thicker/deeper and the mixer-brush made the different colors of wave blend together better.  |
