Flight of the Giraffa – Final Update

The time has come, it’s the day before final and I’m tired as fuck. This week I finished the final art assets and animations for the game, making it almost one hundred percent complete. The only thing left now is code writing and bug fixing. There really is so much more stuff that I wish we had time to implement into the final version of the game, but I’m still happy with what we ended up with 🙂

Anyway, you’re probably wondering why I named this post ‘So much death’. That’s because some of the final animations we needed for our game were death animations. I know we’re only supposed to write about one artifact. But seeing how I animated the same thing three times for three different assets, I thought that I might as well showcase all of them.

I started with the animation that would take the longest time to complete. In this case it would be the animation for when the player dies, because I wanted it to be a little more gruesome when compared to the alien ones. I knew that I wanted it to contain blood or something, so I thought it would be fun to see the avatar explode from the inside out. So when I started with the animation process in Photoshop, I began to split our poor giraffe into pieces. I used the lasso tool to select parts of the body and separate them from the rest. I then moved those parts further away and made them smaller, while at the same time adding some splashes of blood here and there. I repeated this process until almost everything of the main body was gone. For the jet-pack I created a small explosion that’s expanding with each frame and slowly fading into smoke. This was actually a really fun animation to create, and here is the end result:

This time you’re probably wondering where the head is. We actually decided that it would look more fun if the head didn’t explode, but instead came of and slowly drifted away when the player died. So that’s why no animation was needed for it.

When I created the death animation for the enemies in the game I pretty much went through the same process. What I did different was to add a few frames of anticipation in the beginning of their animation. I also made each of their explosion the same color as themselves to get some variation.

Here’s what they look like:

                                       

But with that this (probably) will be my last update on the game. So thanks for reading and stay awesome! 😀 Nordling Out.

Flight of the Giraffa – Update 5

Hello and welcome to yet another blog post. The beta-period is over and everyone is now working hard trying to get their games ready for the final play-test. So one of the things I’ve been working on is yet another animation for the game. More specifically it’s the tail of fire that the meteors in our game will be having. So the tail I’ve been working on is the final asset that the meteor needs in order to be complete.

During the beta play-test the meteors in the game only had their exploding animation. They looked extremely boring when only tumbling through space waiting to get blown-up by the player. So I decided it was time to give them their final touch.

When I started to think of how I was going to animate the fire tail, I had two ideas.

The first one was to animate it like I animated the projectiles for the game, so it would look like they had a fireball effect to them. Meaning that there would be fire moving from the sides of the meteor that’s making its way down to the end of the tail.

My second idea was to make the fire move like the body of a snake. And since I already had animated a fireball, I thought doing a snake-tail would be much more fun.

The first step was to draw the basic shapes for the tail, and later on just choose some colors for it. The tricky part came when I started to animate it. I just couldn’t get the movement right. It didn’t want to move like a snake at all! So I searched on Google for some gifs on snakes to use as reference, and found the perfect gif to help me.

This one:

 

I placed the frames of the gif in Photoshop and removed 2/3 of all the frames since I only needed ten for my animation. Then I simply drew ten frames of fire that moved along the snakes movement and voilá! So here’s what the final animation looks like.

 

I actually think it looks pretty dope!

And here’s the sprite sheet that will be used and place behind the meteor in-game:

I spent about 3 hours on this animation, which is a lot faster than any other of the animations I’ve done. But I guess that’s not surprising seeing it as how I’m finally pretty used to animating in Photoshop.

But that’s it for this week! Thanks for reading and bye!

Flight of the Giraffa – Update 3

So for my third post I’m going to talk about an animation I’ve created during this week. This animation didn’t actually take as much time as the one I wrote about in my first update, even thou it’s a little more complex. Probably because this time around I had gotten used to using the frame animation in Photoshop. The entire process for this artifact took me about 7 hours, which is about the time I anticipated.

In our game there is a specific thing that the player needs to do in order to obtain a power-up. That thing is to shoot down incoming meteors that has traversed from distant galaxies, bringing with them god knows what. Anyway, this brings me to one of the things I have been working on this week, the animation for when the meteors in the game explodes.

When I designed the meteors I didn’t want them to just be gray rocks that easily could melt into the background and potentially be ignored. So to make them ‘pop’ a bit more I made them consist of mostly glowing lava, surrounded by a small layer of rocks. I was really pleased with how the design turned out, and I actually got a little bit of inspiration to their design from some levels in Super Mario Galaxy.

When I got around to animating the meteor I actually had a lot of fun, at first. I realized like two frames in that this would take quite some time to finish. This mindset made me put the animation on hold for a day while I worked on other assets. Eventually I continued with the animation and made it a total of 12 frames. Since the animation is of a floating lava-rock that explodes, I used a reference picture that showed a version of how an explosion could look to help me on the way.

This is how the sprite sheet for the animation turned out:

For each frame I started with the line work and continued with coloring it. The hard part for me was to make the explosion that occurs in the middle to look consistent in every frame. But I think that the end result looks like it will work pretty good for our game. I’m most pleased with how the rocks on the meteor look when they are broken apart by the force that occurs at the center when it explodes.

This is a rendition of how the meteor looks in motion:

That’s all for this week, see ya in the next post!

Flight of the Giraffa – Update 1

We are now a couple of weeks into our space shooter projects. My team and I over took the concept document for this game from another team, and our task is now to simply create the game in all of its intended beauty.

In Flight of the Giraffa you play as Ginny, a heroic giraffe who’s been abducted by aliens together with her brother. After being subjected to all kinds of alien experiments, she gains the ability to fire projectiles from in between her horns. She is now fighting back trying to find her lost brother who’s being held captive somewhere amongst the alien fleet.

I have the role as Game Designer in this project and I have up to this point been working a lot on writing our Game Design Document (GDD) as well as doing some art assets for the game. So the artifact from last week I wanted to write about is the projectiles I made that Ginny will be shooting. I put roughly about 6-7 hours in total into creating these, which is way longer than I originally anticipated.

I started by sketching up a fireball like projectile, since I thought that I a fireball was something I later on would be able to animate. The other reason to why I choose this design was because I thought it looked really cool, and I also think it will feel really satisfying to just take down enemies with it.

Now came the time to polish it and create an animation for it, and since I really haven’t worked with 2D animation in Photoshop before, this could go both ways. The reason for me working in Photoshop so much is just because that’s what we mostly use in the 2D Graphics course. In order to make it so that it would fit in with the rest of the assets in the game, the lead artist in our group Theo Bengtson told me to give it thick outlines and bright, simple colors. And I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, it actually looks like something we could use 🙂

The reason for this asset taking so much time was because animating in Photoshop when you haven’t done it before is a real pain in the butt. I had to scrap and redo everything sometimes because the timeline function is really screwed me over. But trial and error has finally made me capable of animating in Photoshop, so for the next asset it will hopefully go smoother. See you next week!