Pitchforks, Torches and Copy paste: How to Easily Create an Angry Mob

Stella from Team Nazgul here again.

Before I go into this week’s topic I’d just like to mention that I think I’ve finally fixed the comment problem! Only took me about… 3 weeks. So sorry about that.

Anyway, this week I’m gonna explain my work process behind the Angry mob in Burn Witch, Burn.

My fist sketch for the angry mob of medieval farmers who chase after the witch protagonist and slay her if she is caught. It is supposed to make the player feel slightly at edge and that there is no time to rest until the level is completed, or if you press pause of course.

First the mob was just a static image with each of the rows of people on different layers. My vision was to ave each layer move slowly up and down creating a sort of wave effect. Sadly neither me or our group’s coders knew how to achieve this effect so for a while to mob was just the different layers flashing without any actual animation. I wanted the wave effect to give the mob some movement without it being distracting.

At some point we completely scrapped the auto scrolling camera that allowed the player to only see the top 3 rows of the mob like I initially illustrated.
The player could now move so far back or the mob could move so close you saw the rest of it. This meant I would have to redo my work, which was planned from the start actually, but I would have to rethink my approach.

First I decided to take the easy route and just make the mob a bunch of pitch black silhouettes. I even got sort of far in my concept until I realized it would be really out of place to have them be completely void of light in this specific world. Our lead designer had created some gnarly lighting effects and a lot of the game is centered around casting light.

I backtracked and took a look at what I already had. I had put more emphasis on light with my original concept for the mob. The first row was lit and you could make out more colors while the back rows were all a dark gray with only highlights. I figured the picture was usable with some minor cleanups and tweaking how the layers functioned.

I merged the first three rows into one and copied the last and darkest row and made it a separate image. After this it was pretty much just a lot of image-flipping and copy pasting different layers to achieve the illusion of a mob.

I haven’t seen the finished product in the game yet but at least on my canvas it looks alright.

See you next week!

About Stella Crawford

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