The sneaky fire tail
Flight of the Giraffa – Update 5Hello and welcome to yet another blog post. The beta-period is over and everyone is now working hard trying to get their games ready for the final play-test. So one of the things I’ve been working on is yet another animation for the game. More specifically it’s the tail of fire that the meteors in our game will be having. So the tail I’ve been working on is the final asset that the meteor needs in order to be complete. During the beta play-test the meteors in the game only had their exploding animation. They looked extremely boring when only tumbling through space waiting to get blown-up by the player. So I decided it was time to give them their final touch. When I started to think of how I was going to animate the fire tail, I had two ideas. The first one was to animate it like I animated the projectiles for the game, so it would look like they had a fireball effect to them. Meaning that there would be fire moving from the sides of the meteor that’s making its way down to the end of the tail. My second idea was to make the fire move like the body of a snake. And since I already had animated a fireball, I thought doing a snake-tail would be much more fun. The first step was to draw the basic shapes for the tail, and later on just choose some colors for it. The tricky part came when I started to animate it. I just couldn’t get the movement right. It didn’t want to move like a snake at all! So I searched on Google for some gifs on snakes to use as reference, and found the perfect gif to help me. This one:
I placed the frames of the gif in Photoshop and removed 2/3 of all the frames since I only needed ten for my animation. Then I simply drew ten frames of fire that moved along the snakes movement and voilá! So here’s what the final animation looks like.
I actually think it looks pretty dope! And here’s the sprite sheet that will be used and place behind the meteor in-game:
I spent about 3 hours on this animation, which is a lot faster than any other of the animations I’ve done. But I guess that’s not surprising seeing it as how I’m finally pretty used to animating in Photoshop. But that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and bye!
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