1st & 2nd week of project work
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It’s the second week of the game project and even though parts of the team came down with a cold during these two weeks it has worked well. I got assigned the task of making the idle sprites and first walk animation for the player character and enemy character in this game. Since the game is in top-down perspective I had to look around for references from other games and their solutions to the top-down graphic problem before working. It’s very difficult to show any kind of graphic information in that kind of perspective and the graphics often end up looking flat. Many games have this tilted top-down perspective, showing objects and characters in a perspective that’s a mix between front view and top-down. It’s a good way to show details on the graphics, while still hinting to the perspective in the game, and that’s what we’ll try to in this game. We decided early on that we would go with pixel graphics in this project since it’s an easy way to keep up a certain standard for the graphics, and also to have the artists working with the same tools. By doing this we can focus on getting the graphics and the game look good, instead of spending time trying to find a work method or tools that will work for all graphic artists in the team.
Animating a pixel graphic isn’t as difficult as one may think. One great advantage with working with pixels is that they’re very easy to move around, and in some cases that’s enough to create an animation. For the player and the enemy walk animations, only the legs and the lower arms were slightly redrawn for the different frames. The head and shoulder motions were created by selecting the pixels of the arm and the hat, and moving them up or down. Another good thing about pixel graphic animation is that you only have to draw two frames for a four frame walk animation if you have a sprite that’s symmetrical. Because for the other two frames where the other leg is put forward, you can just flip the sprite horizontally and then you’ll have a mirrored version of the sprite showing the opposite leg going forward. It saves a lot of time and work, and it’s a good way to maintain the animation quality. Four frames is the minimum for a walk animation in a game, and in this project the enemy sprite ended up on four frames and the player sprite on six frames. The player walk animation was originally planned to be on four frames too, but the motion on the character’s trench coat didn’t work out well and needed two extra frames to make it look smoother. This is something that may be adjusted later on in the project, but it depends on how it works out in the game.  |
