It's been a long and bumpy year

...but nearly a year on, I'm back on my feet and ready to kick ass.

Today's drawing is for day two of InkTober, a one a day art challenge in inks for the month. Seeing as I'm doing it on a tablet, it's cheating a little bit I don't care.

Today's theme is "noisy", and this quick little doodle is based on me having the audacity to ask my housemate to turn down his obnoxiously loud music. Apparently any volume goes if it's 9 pm.

The worst part about him getting irritable it's that he's in his late 30s. I'd expect it off a teenager, not a full grown man!

28/5/15 - Games Updates!

Hello, everyone!

A few updates about what's going on right now.
Tomorrow is our end of year show! We've finished our game on time, but we're having some technical issues after realising it might not play on a University PC, but we're working on that, at the moment. There's a few things that we've not been able to implement, such as the beginning animation part, and a few things that made the cut, and was subsequently cut off because of lag issues.

My favourite thing that my brother has implemented is the Mad Hatter card - which either gives lots of points, or drops you down to one heart - which really sucks if you're headed for a rock! He initially made it for instant death, but I like it better dropped down to one.

 Either way, despite our problems, I'm really happy with what we've done.


Secondly, I went to a Game Dev meeting yesterday, and met with a man called Karl which fixed all  most of my problems with triggers, which is really exciting after everything got working nicely. Now it's just a case of using the same code to implement animation on trigger. I'd really like to get my bomb working, which would be brilliant, but I'm happy either way if I don't get it fixed.


And now for a few sketches, which I did today waiting in the hair salon. Bonus cartoon of myself looking a little like Ellen DeGeneres.

25/5/15 - Game Jam - Polished Animation

This animated sprite was made by swapping out the movie clips in flash for polished artwork made by Ronja in photoshop. Certain assets, such as the dress, the apron and the hair were un-animateable, so I've been a little naughty and worked my way around it.


1. THE APRON.

The apron was really beautifully made, but it wouldn't animate properly - in fact, everything that didn't animate had a 'flow' - cloth, hair, flowing nicely. Except it just wouldn't in flash. So I've gotten around this by making a shape tween where the apron was, and animated like that.


2. THE DRESS.

The dress was tricky. I initially planned out for there to be many frames to the dress as seen in my early animations, but when I used the warp tool in photoshop on the initial dress, it didn't play out in flash nicely. The dress is perhaps two or three of eight original warped images. Not the most flowing of all the animation, but it serves it's purpose.


3. THE HAIR.

I used the same kind of tricks as I did with the apron. However, the shape tween didn't want to play nicely as one big shape, so I split it into three with three colours, and did it like that. The downnside to this was that the texture of the hair - all the  nicely painted one in photoshop - isn't present, but adding the original over the top gives it a nice feel.




IN OTHER PROGRESS:

Dan and Callum have been working solidly on code. It's wickedly addictive, and now is just a case of adding in polished assets in place of placeholders

25/05/15 - GAME JAM - Animation Update

Hello all!

Last time I left off, I had just roughed out the basic body animation in flash with tweens and keyframes. Callum suggested that perhaps the original  -  on the left looked like she was jumping, so I switched the timing of one of the legs.

Today, I've been working on the flow of the dress, here's what I've got so far. I'm still not sure what one I should choose just yet, so I'll be working in both. The good thing about using symbols to animate is that I can swap them out for nicely coloured ones, and all should still be the same. 

Next is animating hair!

24/5/15 - Another game jam progress post

Because this is on such a short schedule, I'll be updating here a lot this week. Combined with the fact that I'm on the art side and not the development this time, there's a lot more to show!

I started with crappy thumbnails in photoshop...

and refined it with this as a reference. I've been looking at all sorts of reference videos. I found one with women jumping on trampolines, and while that was really great for dresses and hair, they all anticipated the fall, so it would look really un-natural. This is why I was looking at diving in my previous post - it's slower to watch and more natural to a point.

After I couldn't find what I was looking for, I found these videos of skateboarders, where falling off is common. In this screenshot, the man was about to fall off, and it's the pose that one makes after being about to fall is what I'm looking for. It looked natural, and I decided to tweak it from there.

Now I'm currently working on animation, here's a peek in .gif form, no refinement, just movement.