By this point, if you’ve been following these blog posts, it should be quite obvious by now that I am pretty much the dedicated sprite artist of our group. I would love to write about something else, but I am left with little choice, as I really haven’t done much else, not counting character designs and such from early development.

This week, I hope to at least cover a different topic than character and enemy sprites. Yes, this week I have, among other things, worked on some sprites for the UI. When it became clear that the very still health point sprites needed some spicing up, I agreed to add some animation to them. But since the first attempt left them unaligned, and an already present glow, I decided to go all out at actually make new animations from scratch.

We had already talked about having the hearts break when you lose a health point, but I decided to take this one step further, and animate them crumble and break. I first made the heart gradually darker, while turning the glow into a reddish brown shadow around the heart. After that I drew short, thin and spread out lines with the eraser across the heart, and then frame by frame made these lines thicker, while also using thinner

lines to connect them. This added a nice cracking effect. When it had cracked enough, I started cutting those chunks out and moving them away from the rest of the heart. I used the lasso tool to select the crumbled-off part of the heart, then I used the transform tool (ctrl+T) to move it. But in stead of moving it normally, I moved the anchor point to the bottom of the heart, and then changed the angle in relation to that point. This made the parts fall outwards.

 

Now I was faced with another problem, when I made the background transparent, the cracks looked too bright. They no longer looked like cracks, it was too obvious I just used the eraser tool. So I decided to use the ‘Square Charcoal’ 3D brush to add some dark

purplish red behind those cracks, as well as around some edges. This looked fine, but the rough lines around the edges did not look the same in each frame, it kind looked like a kind of jittery black mess crawling along the edges. Basically, it looked like a crumbling cookie with ants.

 

To fix this, I decided to draw some lines sticky black liquid that stretched between the separating parts before breaking off entirely. This really drove home the idea that this was a heart, even though it used the classic heart shape, instead of a realistic one.

Then I put all the frames into ‘TexturePacker’, a programme that makes sprite sheets from separate images, to put together a sprite sheet and call it a day! Sprite work is tedious, but with this, I at least got some variety!