Group Project -
Sprint One .Pt2
So over this weekend I'll be getting on
with some group project work that I've been assigned by my group
managers (Bradley Smith & Joe Easter). Haven't honestly done much
over this week for it so I've got quiet a bit to catch up on for the
MVP (Minimal Viable Product) presentation on Wednesday.
One of the tasks I've kind of been
avoiding a bit has been the animation of the character, there’s two
reasons for this. One, I've never animated anything before and have
no idea where to start other than doing it in flash. Two, I dislike
my character. Nevertheless I'll give it a go.
After reading up on animating and
watching a few tutorial video's I started to break my character down
into sections in photoshop to link them up via the skeleton tool in
flash later on. This task was tedious as the character wasn't really
built to be broken up like this so I had to do a lot of aesthetic
mending as I did it. What I'm walking away from this with is
understanding that to animated characters in flash your better off
either doing the character in flash itself or doing the character in
PS and making the sections as you go (hands, arms, body, waist, legs
etc.). This will ease the process later on. I'm also thinking doing a
character in Illustrator would be another easier way as it works like
flash in terms of vector art but has a lot more tools than flash
does.
Once I’d imported the PS file into
flash I started to assemble my character and linking them via the
skeleton tool. After a few hours of simply messing around with the
character and learning how to use the key-frames I was able to make a
semi passable walking character for the MVP. The full length of the
walking cycle is 24fps so that’s 1 second long but looped.
Note : Unfinished, this
was totally a test of animating
Truth be told, it wasn't completely smooth sailing. I encountered a lot of issues when importing the character via PS because there were small painted pixels in the sections that were making the image selection area a lot larger than the body part so I was forced to go back to PS to clean the art up. Found a good way of cleaning the art up quick as well with the cut selection tool so should prove to be useful in future.
The skeleton tool took quite a few
hours to get the hang of as well but think I’ve learnt enough to
feel comfortable in doing small animations like this and maybe with a
easier and a in proportion character, make it a bit more realistic.
Despite spending a good 6-8 hours on this animation I’m hoping we
will redo the character design at a later date which means this is
all in vain but at least it will show I've tried my hand at animation
for the sprint and MVP.
Refine, Refine,
Refine
If you haven't read the first part of
my blog regarding the group project you can find it HERE.
In the post I gave you a preview of the finished art style we will be
using in the project, but alas I've found a few flaws in its design
when implementing it into flash and a lot of the platform angels were
off which will course issues later on in the game as the levels
becoming more complex in design. So I've done quiet a bit of tweaking
to the platforms and added a few more details into the background to
really enforce this mysterious dark environment feeling.
Another thing that made me go back on
my work was the adding of new techniques and learning how some tools
work in photoshop that I wasn't previously aware of. Horrible feeling
having to go back on work you previously thought to be complete but
as the sprints almost over I've decided to do the changes now rather
than have to do it in another sprint which may course issues.
In addition to the changes I've also
done the 4th and final level of the sprint & started to compile a
assets folder containing all the images I've used and designed for
the game. This will enable anyone to make a level within the game
graphically but of course you will still need the coding and
knowledge of how we constructed the game.
< level 1 Level 2>
< Level 3 Level 4 >
While I was refining the levels a bit I kept
in-visioning shooting stars random appearing across the sky and the
birds flying off into the distance. Would be awesome to do something
like that but will have to discuss this with the managers but even if
they agree to do it I doubt we would do extra stuff like that till
really late into the project as its just extra work that we may or
may not be able to do.
