Animating a huge sound wave
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In my team’s space shooter game, there will be a huge attack which will swipe the whole screen and destroy any crystal enemies that stands in its way. The player has to charge the attack by repeatedly tapping the 1-key on the keyboard and then fire it by pressing the E-key. Since the player avatar is a singing dragon, the attack will be a big sound wave. My first idea was to have big waves that makes the whole screen move. So I searched for references on Google and found this animation. After some sketches, I found it really hard to achieve the look that I wanted. Therefore, I decided to go with a more simple design. I made a half circle and repeated it four times to create a wave look. Then I created frames to make it move across the screen. I used layer masks to make it look like it is expanding from one point (the dragon’s mouth) and to make it fade out at the end of the screen. When the basic animation was done, it was time to make it look good. I used the Gradient Tool to give the wave some colour. I also changed the colour of the lines to fit in better. After that, I used two custom brushes to add sparkles and music note symbols to each frame. And so, the whole design was finished. I chose the blue colour to fit into the game’s color scheme. But I made it very bright to stand out and show that something really big and special is happening. I also enhanced that feeling further by adding sparkles. The music note symbols was added to show that it is a sound wave passing by. It also made the wave sparkle a bit more.
I rendered the frames to an .GIF-animation to easily show the sound wave to the rest of the team members which approved the design. However, the programmers found it hard to implement the animation correctly. The reason for that was the size of the frames, which covered the whole screen (1920 pixels wide). After some trial and error, we found a solution. I had to create a new animation with all frames on top of each other. It was like animating a walk cycle for a character. The programmers created an animated projectile and then everything worked as planned. The sound wave was made entirely in Photoshop CC.
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