Desolate Echo – Week 8

So, here we are.
The final week. The final post.
Alright, here we go.

This week I would like to present the bane of my existence, the death animation for the Prowler. It looks like this:

Eight separate animations that need to follow the same general movement while still looking like the body parts have weight and momentum? Sure, I didn’t need to sleep anyway.

Boy, did I bite off more than I could chew. I understand now why so many enemies explode in games that use sprites, it’s so much easier to animate.
I’ve been going at this particular beast over the course of several weeks now, making small continuous progress while constantly having to deal with more pressuring matters along the way.
But FINALLY it is done!

I guess it’s only a formality at this point, but I used GraphicsGale for this one (again).
The ability to animate with layers, different line tools, flood fills, pixel perfect selection with the Wand, not to mention Onion Skin (it’s, like, the best function) has helped tremendously.

I began by taking an image of the Prowler in its idle, flying, state and made that the first frame. Next, I simply moved some parts up slightly and some down slightly to give the impression of the Prowler’s body reacting to the force enacted upon it by the killing shot.
For the next couple of frames I started with the shape of the main body, drawing it as it turns in the air and falls to the ground. As it is completely still after that, I only had to copy and paste it into the rest of the frames.

Next, I animated the head, drawing the shape of it as it turns to the side. Here I reached the first realization that this was going to be a much more complicated animation than I had originally bargained for. I had to make it look like the head slams into the ground and bounces a couple times before coming to rest. Seems easy, right? Wrong. It’s not just the shape that needs to look right, it’s all the details too. And with the limited amount of maneuverability that pixel graphics allow, I had to find compromises that sacrificed some detail for a more fluid motion. Switching back and forth between frames and moving a few pixels to see if the motion looks right probably took up half of the time spent on this whole animation.

Next came the arms. Rince and repeat, only now there were two motions that had to be checked and synced. Yay.

The wings were probably the easiest to animate, I had great help of the Spline Curve tool for the general shapes. Just some simple padding out of the limbs and filling in the wing membranes and they’re good to go. I wanted the Prowler’s left wing to kind of splash into the ground and fold up the membranes somewhat. I don’t know if I pulled it off correctly, but it looks kinda ok, at least.

I also added a splatter of blood from a chest wound, as well as a dust cloud when the body hits the rock floor.

After all the animations were done I filled in the details of each body part, a daunting task in itself, almost as much work as just the animations of the shapes. Oh, well.

I wanted to make it look like the Prowler is a tough creature with some weight to it, so I made a heavy fall for it. Having the head, arms and wings move independently after the body has come to a rest, following momentum, really adds a measure of realism to the whole animation. At least I hope I managed to pull it off.

Anyway, this was a beast, but I did it! Having little to no experience animating before I started at this school, I feel a little impressed with myself. But just a little. Can’t have too much fun, can we? ; )

So I guess that’s it for this week and this course.
I know we’re not supposed to show more than one artifact per week, but this is the last entry and I just don’t care. So here’s the end screen for our game:

(Just finished it and wanted to show it off, and it’s also kind of the conclusion to this blog series, so…)

See all y’all in the next course.
Cheerio! : D

 

 

Desolate Echo – Week 7

So, I’ve been working on an animation for an energy shield for the hovercraft, specifically when the shield is recharged and re-activated again after being depleted by an enemy’s attack.
This is what I ended up with:
(and it’s looking pretty cool if I may say so myself)

A slow flash followed by softly flickering panels

I used GraphicsGale as usual, as the ability to create layers with opacity really is a big help in making this kind of transparent shield.

Design-wise I went with a bubble shield as it looks good, is easy to understand and implement, and is most plausible if you crave realism in all things (because of magnetic fields and such, I’d rather not go into it now, I’m very tired).
To make it look more like the kind of blocky design we wanted to give to our protagonists’ technology, I made the bubble consist of several hexagonal panels. The bubble shield featured in Halo 3 has been a major influence for this artefact.

The animation was done by creating the brightest state of the shield first, using multiple layers of circles and one layer with the hexagonal panels. Then, I gradually made the different layers more transparent until they disappeared completely.
I also made some panels disappear before the rest, and then some more of them, and then even more, until I achieved an effect where it looks like the panels go out a bit asymmetrically.
After that, I simply made a reverse version for the build-up and followed the whole thing up with some panels that light up individually. I made it so that one panel never completely disappear before another lights up, except for the last one.

The whole point of this animation is to give the player a visual feedback that their shield is recharged and fully operational again. I wanted it to be eye-catching without it being too distracting, you are supposed to be able to tune it out after a while, only registering its mechanical significance when it happens. Also, it’s not supposed to look like something bad is happening, you’re supposed to feel reassured and a tiny bit safer.
Speed-wise, I tried to make it so that it would match the sound effect we had chosen for this feature. It’s kind of an electronic “whooshy” sound, that turns into a short stream of sounds that are somewhere between beeping and clicking.

All in all, it turned out pretty good. I think.

Well, that’s it for this week. More to come.

Desolate Echo – Week 6

This week I worked on some animations for the Spyderling – one of the enemies in the game – and specifically on its death animation. I am really satisfied with the result.

A more crystalline creature

A creature of flesh and blood

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When we first conceptualized the spyderlings, we envisioned them to be either creatures made up in part of crystals or to be creatures that had crystals growing on/into them.
This affected the death animation, as we would have to decide whether to have blood in it or not. As of yet it is still not official, but I think we’re going with the bloody one because… well… cool.

So, this one was tough to make, I began by taking the image of an idle spyderling and making a few frames where the eyes start to glow brighter and brighter, I then proceeded to take the image and chop it up into a number of pieces. Next I painstakingly moved, rotated and cleaned up each piece (because of pixel distortion when rotating) and made sure that the movement of each piece followed the acceleration and deceleration of the explosive force.
I also discovered the hard way that in order for the movement to look anywhere close to natural you have to make the pieces move for a different amount of frames. It looked really silly when everything stopped at once, so I did some tweaking and it now looks more fluid and organic.

The explosive force that detonates the spyderling upon death was made by filling in the gaps when the spyderling first is starting to go apart with a purple-tinted white, culminating in one frame of a large explosion with long streaks of light.
The immediately following frame has a much smaller residual flare that diminishes in a smooth fashion, making it look like the explosion is the result of some built-up energy from the crystals. If the ship uses these crystals to power the ship, we reasoned, why couldn’t the crystals also infuse creatures with power of some kind?
Though not originally intended, this idea made for a nice piece of fluff and a nice effect.

The blood effect was achieved by filling out the space between detached limbs and other body parts with the green blood you see in the animation above.
Next, I just added some blood to each of the “contact surfaces” in each frame, i.e. the parts where exposed flesh and blood would be/come out and painted out the trajectories of the droplets and globs of innards.
I found out that if you make the actual flying pieces relatively small and the splash-down areas a little bigger while also ending the movement abruptly, you can create the effect of the blood being flung outwards and landing on the ground in a long streak.
All in all, a pretty nice effect if I may say so myself.

So, imagine now a player facing off against a group of between 10 and 30 of these things, fast and deadly but relatively weak. The player will take one out with one or two shots, resulting in a satisfying pop and a splatter of gore. When the dust settles there will be a field of blood and body parts strewn around (and hopefully the sprites won’t look all too plastered on top of one another), and the player might have some scrapes but hopefully they will still be flying, still searching the dark.

(Note: While I do enjoy gratuitous violence in video games, movies and such, I want to be clear that I abhor violence in real life; it belongs in fiction and nowhere else)

Desolate Echo – Week 5

So, for this week I present an attacking Prowler, one of the hostile creatures found in the caverns of Echo Six.
It looks like this:

Prowler and hovercraft comparison

 

 

 

 

 

 

As usual, I used GraphicsGale for this. The animation is 16 frames long and each frame consists of four separate animations: the arms, wings, head and body (this is the order in which I animated them). The animation is only played when the Prowler comes within a certain range from the player.

I began with the arms and claws, rotating them appropriately for each frame and cleaning up afterwards. For the slashing motion I added a trail that lasts two frames, it is very prominent in the first frame and significantly reduced in the second to create the illusion of a swift strike without the need of extra frames in the animation.
And yes, the rigidity of the two limbs is intended, as I wanted them to feel all tensed up for maximum force transferred to the target.

For the wings, I drew the arms and index fingers of the wing in each frame to get the general motion. I then drew the two other fingers and lastly I drew the wing membranes to make it look like the wings were pushing air.
The wings were probably the most problematic part of the whole animation, since our game is supposed to be in true top-down perspective. I originally intended the wings to strike backwards so that the Prowler appeared to be “pushing” itself forward through the air.
However, it proved to be extremely difficult to pull off this motion, so I reused the frames I had already made and made it look like its wings were beating downward in a gentle fashion. This also fit our vision of the Prowler as a silent hunter, hiding in the shadows and sneaking up on its prey on soundless wings.

The head is not really animated per se, I just moved it up and down so that it looks like the Prowler is rearing back somewhat in preparation for each strike.

The same can be said for the front-most chitin plate on the body, while the two rear-most ones are synced with the beating of the wings. With the second from the front I tried to even out the two motions, to a questionable degree of success.
Speaking of the body, I really should not have designed the Prowler with a tail that curves up under the body. It will probably only be visible when the prowler dies, and the player will be like: “Huh. Weird.”
I don’t know. It just seems like a weird, unnecessary thing.

Oh, well. Live and learn.
Onward to the next week!

Desolate Echo – Week 4

This week I’ve been working with Victor Kristiansson on a re-design of the sprite of our player avatar.
(note that only the hull will be addressed in this post, as the turret is a separate entity)

Original sprite

New sprite

The original sprite received some feedback saying that it looked “too box-like”  or “like a screw”, and needed to look more “like a hovercraft”. So how would we achieve that?

First off, the hovercraft is designed mainly for mining metals and minerals deep underground, where monsters and rockfalls are a constant health risk.
For that, we envisioned a stout, durable frame with thick armour plates.
Now, it can be pretty hard to design a strongbox that is not box-like but I think we did a pretty good job of it.

We tried to give the hovercraft a rounder, vaguely egg-like overall shape by expanding the cargo hold sideways, a move that effectively eliminated the screw shape. Then we switched the colours of the thrusters in the back and front to a dark grey. We also gave the details on the hull increased definition through the use of more shades of red, even though we might have given it somewhat more contrast. It’s probably fine, as the player isn’t likely to see the whole craft lit up anyway.

We used Krita for this. Well, I used pen and paper and Victor implemented my design into the program.

I also completed the map we’ll be using in the alpha, it looks like this:

The player will begin somewhere roughly in the center of the map. The big square on the top right is where the boss will be located.

We wanted to have a few big caverns with connecting tunnels that grow more twisting the closer the player gets to the boss, creating a challenge in using the searchlight effectively and limiting the player’s mobility.

I used Tiled for this one, as it is a program that is designed to, well… work with tiles. We already had an existing image of the map, so I just took that and put it in an image layer in Tiled and then I created a tileset from the tiles that we had and applied them into the tile layer.

I’m actually a little surprised as to how easy the program was to use, I didn’t even have to read a tutorial or anything, it was very self-explanatory. I like that in a software tool, tip o’ the hat to the creators.

I guess that wraps up this week. More to come.

Desolate Echo – Week 3

This week I’ve been working on some art and animation for our game, Desolate Echo (subject to change). We’re going to have a giant crystal-encrusted, spider-like boss that can perform various types of attacks, the most common being swipes and stabs with its front legs.

One of the artifacts that I’ve been working on this week is an animation for one of the stabs. So far it looks like this:

This is the “praparation-for-attack” animation that will give the player some time to react and move out of the way. I wanted to create an organic feeling to the movement, if you look closely you can see that the topmost leg segment stops its movement a moment before the lower parts do, this to create a feeling that the leg is “unfurling” in a menacing way. I also put little green dots on each joint to make it easier to see the idea of the movement.
I use a program called GraphicsGale to make pixel art and animations, since it is easy to use and specifically created for these tasks. It can work with layers and frames, it has opacity and onion skin functions, as well as many useful tool options.
The way I made this was by:
1. Creating eight frames
2. Draw the first frame
3. Copy and tweak the image for each subsequent frame by cutting up the leg and rotating the pieces (I made sure to capture the flow of the movement before moving on to the next step)
4. Some clean-up is always required as pixels will jitter around when images are rotated.
5. Checking and double-checking that the shape of the leg is kept throughout the animation

Another piece I worked on this week was a base sprite for one of the smaller monsters the player will encounter in the game, the Spyderling. They will mostly hang out around the boss and attack the player in swarms when approached.
The two variants I’ve been working on look like this:

(I apologise for the small size)

The one on the left would take up an area of 128×96 pixels and the one on the right “only” 64×64. The left one has – in my opinion – a nicer look to it, but it is also HUGE when compared to the player avatar, which is a measly 32 pixels long. So either I go with the one on the right or I make an even smaller sprite. It will be somewhat more difficult to get a good level of detail, but maybe that won’t matter as much since there will be a swarm of them and they will move around a lot.

Well, that’s it for this week. More to come.