BLUP, Main Character, Basic Animations
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2017-02-09 BLUP, the main character of which the player will take control in our game based on the Echo concept document, is a small explorer-robot-submarine whose sole purpose is the exploration of deep and dark waters where no one else has ever been. What follows is an insight into the creative process leading up to four finished animations for the player movement. Creative ProcessIn the conceptual stages of development, it was decided that the character would benefit from being cute and appealing in a warm and comfortable way, as it would enable the creation of some interesting contrasts within the game, perhaps with rough and hostile environments and creatures. After iterating upon a few pencil sketches, a single placeholder sprite was produced:  It was created completely in Photoshop through the use of different brushes and adjustments to achieve the desired effect. The team was happy with this rough first stage, which allowed me to continue working on a more polished version that would be ready for animation. This is the polished base sprite:  This was created in a very similar way as the placeholder, but in order to make it ready for animation every part was put on a separate layer. The outlined glass dome is separated from the ”head”, the eyes are on a different layer and so on. Separating the layers in such a way allowed me to easily save each layer as a a separate .PNG file, and put into a folder. This folder then became the project folder in an animation program called Spriter, and let me rig the character with a 2d skeleton.  The player will be able to move through the caverns of the deep in four directions on a two dimensional plane, there is a need for some visual feedback in order for this to feel as real as possible. Four basic animations for BLUP were thus created:
As the character is quite compact, and also a robot, it was not deemed fitting to use highly expressive and action-filled animations. The movement is therefore quite subdued and careful. This will hopefully reflect the players’ feeling of suspense and caution. To improve the expressiveness of the character there are plans for animating the eyes separately and having reactions to specific events, the sound design may also play a larger part in communicating the reactions that BLUP has to the environment and any creatures that he may run into. The green echo-signal emitter box that is present in the turning animation was omitted for the others as it will be a separate animated entity placed on top of the animations inside of Unity. Stylistic ChoicesAs mentioned above, the main goal of the character design was to make it appealing in a warm and friendly way, to have it look cute and relatable. This led me to pursue rounder and friendlier shapes as opposed to spiky and rough ones, which will be more prevalent in some environments and the enemy types. It has been mentioned to me that the eyes and head have been are reminiscent of the robot Wall-E from the Pixar movie of the same name, which I find is a brilliantly cute and expressive character. I believe that I subconciously tried to emulate this feeling that Wall-E evokes during the conceptual stages of the design. The colours were picked with warmness as a priority: yellow, red, orange and pink. However, in order to imply the ambience of the deep ocean the colours are tinted slightly with green and blue. /Felix Wahlström Lead Artist of Team Rukh  |
