This week I have made a major change of plans. I was planning for about 24 frames per playable character, as well as about 3-5 frames per enemy, but when play testing it became clear that the some of the animations I had planned would not be needed, as such, I am dropping all plans of any forward- and backwards-leaning sprites. Since the background is already moving, moving the player character backward makes it appear as if she is only decelerating, as such, an animation for moving backward might actually look a bit odd. As for moving forward, it appears as if she is already moving fast enough to where further acceleration would do little to how her clothes and hair animate. This basically cuts the workload for sprites in half, leaving more room for things like music (which I will cover in a future blog post).
So with the alpha on the horizon, I set my goals on replacing the place-holder sprites in our current build. That is the other player character, as well as the standard enemy. I started out by making a simple pallet swap for the female player character, something we were planning on doing anyway, to take the place of the first sprite draft I made for her, which we were using as the place holder. I made sure that this swap had clearly different and contrasting colours from the standard pallet, so that they can easily be spotted and differentiated between in the game, since you have to control each character separately. It remains to be seen if this worked.
After making the pallet swap, I started sketching out the standard enemy, using a few idea I got from the play test, namely to give the enemy a skateboard, to remove the need of animating a walk cycle. This meant I was able to complete this sprite very quickly. All I had to do was draw the torso, then add legs that I could cut up using the polygonal lasso, angle them using transform, and then filling in the gaps. Then all I had to do was add a skateboard. Since the sprites with angled legs would only be used when moving in the opposite direction, I could keep the torso stationary, instead of having to animate it compensating and leaning for balance. This way it is also easier to make the firing of projectiles look better, since the projectile will always spawn in the same place relative to the sprite, as the torso, and as such the weapon, is stationary within the sprite itself. lastly I added a few little details like electricity casting light over the arm, and that was that.
Finally, I got to the big task of that day; giving our character a death animation. Unlike previous animations, where I’ve been able to re-use assets from previous frames, this one uses a lot of unique frames, as the animation ends with her rolling on the ground. This means I have to draw each fram individually. I have not yet completed this task, but I have been able to at least make a rough sketch of the animation. Hopefully I will be able to complete it before the alpha, but it will be tough.
maxsnall 