Sprite animation
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My main task for this week has been to create and animate a sprite, in this case the main character for the game my team Amarok is creating. I have started out by making several different drafts and rough animations during the previous weeks, but this week I set out to properly finish the sprite, and undoubtedly this has been the most time consuming artifact I’ve been working on this week. I made two animations for the sprite: an idle/movement animation as well as an attack animation. I drew the sprite and animated it in Photoshop, and created the sprite sheet in Sprite Sheet Packer. I chose to animate the sprite frame by frame. I did this, not only because I’m familiar with the process, but also because long, flowing materials such as the character’s dress and hair are difficult to animate using other techniques. I wanted to give the feeling of how light the hair and the dress actually are by making them flow and flap in the wind, and to make this look the most natural I had to animate it frame by frame. The option would have been to make a clip doll animation, but using one drawing of the hair for example cut into pieces would make it look stiff and less light and flowing. I had to make some changes to the attack animation. First off, I animated the character pushing her arm straight forward to fire the projectile from her palm using magic. This, however, was scrapped quickly since the player will be able to fire projectiles in any direction using the mouse. It would look off and weird if the character looks like she’s firing straight forward, but the projectile goes backwards instead. To make this work, I moved her arm a bit towards the lantern and added a glow animation to it to make it look like she’s charging it up with magic. The projectiles will then be fired from the lantern instead of the character itself. These are the two sprite animations I made:
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