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.

24/05/15 - GAME JAM

Hi everyone. After finishing Uni, myself, my brother (the code guy), Callum, Ronja and Matt are teaming up to create a game in six days. Currently, we're on day two, and it's due for Thursday. Exciting!


Hopefully, it won't take nearly as long as me on my own, and now there's a dedicated person for code, it can't go wrong.

This is basically what we're trying to do.

This is Matt's quick concept of our game. The idea is that it's a never ending free-fall game controlled by A&D keys. Avoid the danger, pick up hearts, score points.

The theme for the end of year show is Alice in Wonderland, so that's what our game is based on. 

I look forward to seeing what we can get done! 

Also, looking at references, I found this. Absolutely gorgeous reference for climbing and diving. <3