Time for animation!
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This week has been all about animation for the game me and my team (Bunnyip) are working on. Since the game is all about fishes, I created an animation for our fishy protagonist Stephen. Since I already had created Stephen the week before, I did not have all the design decisions to think about like colors, shapes, texture etc. I had all the different assets in separate layers so everything can be changed easy. (The eyes, eyelids, eyebrow, gun etc.)
What I did was to erase the fishtail and draw a new one in a new layer, for each frame. I made two new fishtails, one on the left side of Stephen and one on the right side, since I already had the picture for the ”middle” movement picture. I thought it was easier to have three main positions and then fill in the gaps in between them. I ended up with five different positions of the fishtail and seven frames for the animation, because I had to use two of them once again to make the animation look smooth and somehow realistic in the movements, although our game has a cartoony style. I started with only doing the line art for each frame and then I added the local color to the fishtails. The next step was to add light and shadows to give the character more shapes and depth rather than just looking flat and lifeless. The last thing I did was to amend the line art, make it thicker in some places to create even more depth and exaggerate different body parts.
I mentioned the separate assets in the beginning of this blog post, that is because those parts are supposed to be coded in Unity by the programmers, the gun is going to be controlled by the player and the pupills are going to follow that movement. What I mean is that those assets should not be in the animation itself, but I wanted to put it toghether just to show how Stephen is going to look together with all the assets.
Here you can see a swimming Stephen ready to shoot his enemies
After I made all the frames for the animation, I added them in a sprite sheet packer to create a sprite sheet that I easy can open up in Unity to make the animation there for our game.
The sprite sheet with all the frames.
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