Animations, Level Design and Credits Menu!

This week, in contrast to last week, I’ve mostly been doing some practical work. One of the tasks of the week has been to improve upon the animations we’ve been using so far in the proejct.

Simon Fredell did the original, few, frames while I have been improving on his work, turning 4 frames into 7, 8 into 15, etc, manually tweening between each frame.

Below is two images to illustrate what I’ve been doing.

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Tweening, or inbetweening as it is also known, is the process of adding more ”frames” to make an animation look more smooth. This can be applied in photoshop very easily if it comes to movements of sprites or fading in/out between sprites, but if you making e.g a walk-cycle (as illustrated above) manual work is required.

This is, unless you have every part of the body on a separe layer. This other method is the one i would prefer, but as I can only improve upon what Simon has given me, and he does not work in that way, this method worked out O.K for us.

The sprite is still a bit janky in places, but that will be improved on during the rest of this (soon to be over) week.

I have also been doing what I’ve been doing most other weeks: I’ve created art assets for our level; Desks, Soda-machines, Kitchen supplies, etc.. Some of the pieces I have worked on are used in the image below, the rest of the assets are things I have worked on during the weeks before (Level design courtesy of Andreas Rodin, Theodor Gerhamn) :

I’ve also been woking on a design for our credits-screen.

The first mockup for the credits-screen turned out unreadable.

Below is the first attempt:

So, after some conversations within the group, we decided to add one more font to the mix (we were only using one before this decision).

Below is the second attempt:

The second attempt, now with another font, turned out better; but it still did not scream ”50′s/60′s” like we wanted it to. So I thought:  ”Why not stop trying to cram everything into one spot and fade between different images instead?”. So that’s what we did, again after some discussion about it. This made it able for me to incorporate the menu-font for the headers, and a new font which we chose to make the names easier to read.

Below is the third, and final, attempt (Also with a transition!):

Thank you for reading, hopefully the imagery is an aid to my explanations!

~Henrik