Week 6 – Tornado
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Final week! This time I have been helping with the animations for the tornado and other animations in the game for the final deadline. In this blog I’m going to focus on the tornado animation. The idea was to have three different types of natural disasters in the game but as we got closer to the deadline we realized that we didn’t have time to perfect all of them. We decided to just implement two of them (tsunami and tornado) and make them as good as possible instead. The tornado that I have been working on this week got its looks thanks to the perspective we have in the game. It’s a sort of top-down perspective but at the same time its a bit tilted back. This made tornado kind of weird and hard to draw since the top of it was shown all the time and it had to taper kind of fast due to the perspective. I decided after looking at some reference pictures of tornados that the easiest way would be to draw several eclipses in a descending size from top to bottom. The problem was finding the right angle so that it would fit with the rest of the game.
After a few tries I found a angle that look ok and then started to make the tornado come alive as a animation. This was easier than expected since I basically just had to move the different eclipses slightly one way and maybe make them a bit bigger or smaller for each sprite. The hard part was to make the first and last fram connect without a to big of a gap or twitch in the animation. The animation won’t be stationary so it doesn’t matter that it’s a short animation since it will move around on the screen. Our game area sits on top o a very grey street and for that reason I couldn’t make the tornado grey since it would blend in the the background. I experimented with a few colors but soon found that a blueish color was the way to go. Wind is often represented with the color blue so i thought it worked out well. After choosing color I just had to add some shadows that moved with the tornado to make it spin and to make it extra clear I added som leaves as well. We will add a shadow to it in-game to make it fit in even more(since everything else has a shadow).
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