Blog 2: Character art and Animation process

This is a second blogpost on the game development for the 2D shooter Echo. In this blog I will more specifically describe the character creation and the animation process for the main mother moth.

I started off by looking up some images of moths and butterflies. The basic idea I had in mind was to create something aesthectically pleasing. I took inspiration from quite a few butterflies. So first I made a sktech of the moth by referencing real moths and then decide to paint it like a certain butterfly. I wanted a fantasy-ish look to it, so I chose the color purple for the butterfly. For the color shading, I used a more darker color for the middle of the wings which gradually became lighter towards the edges. I added some dust effect to the wings to add the fantasy look to it. After I showed this to our team’s lead artst he commented that it had a night like feel to it. I wholeheartedly agreed. It added to the fantasy look, so I enchanced the look by adding more dust to the wings and made it more visible. The end result was this:

When I made the art for the moth I had painted all its different parts of separate layers. This allowed me to control the movement for each specific part while doing the animation for the moth. I had decided to go for a frame by frame animation method instead of using clip doll as I thought that it would be less work for the current animation cycle needed.
The animation cycle of the moth was a movement animation. Since it as a moth, its movement animation was a flying animation. To do this, all I did was rotate all the wings and antennas by a set degree for every frame, for a grand total of seven frames. Those seven frames cover the movement of the wings downwards. And then I reverse the frames for the wings moving upwards. When I play then all together it gives a fairly smooth animation of a flying moth. This animation is something I was quite satisfied with. I could have made it look better by skewing the wings for some frames. But for now this is what I have for now:

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