Suit Em’ Up – Buggers

Hello again!

 

This week I have been working on our melee enemy “the Bugger”. He is a flying mad bug who when he sees you will do anything to head-butt you. His A.I is pretty smart as he tries to see where you’re heading and charges towards that point to cut you off and smash you into little robot pieces which makes him a though opponent.

The main thing I have done this week is doing the moving animation for Buggers in four directions: up, down, and both profile directions (which are the same sprites but flipped vertically). First of I quickly sketched out the basic structure and pose of each of the three directions in Sketchbook Pro. Then I opened these sketches in Illustrator and started to transform the sketches in to coloured vector graphics. Illustrator is great tool mainly because it works in vector graphics, so I don’t have to care about resolution at all. But it is even greater as I can easily change individual shapes at any time in this part of the process and get very clean lines and work with only mouse and keyboard.

 

After I have transformed Bugger into vectors for the standard pose and his first frame of each direction, I start to pick out which body-parts that should be moving relative to the parts that they are attached too and copy them in to a new layer. In this case everything is mainly connected to his head and then reconnected throughout other body parts .When I have changed a body part a little to create a difference between two frames I copy the changed part to a new layer to change it for the next frame and repeat the process. This results in a smooth moving effect when played fast.

 

When all the basic frames are finished in Illustrator I export my files to Photoshop. Then in Photoshop I start a timeline and simply choose which layers that should be shown in which frames letting me use many layers more than once. When I can see that the basic animation flows well I add some glow to the bugger giving him his more dramatic and magical appearance. And for a final touch I move him up and down to give the optical illusion that he is flying or floating in mid-air.

There is still some last touches that needs to be done, but this is how he looks for now!

This character is using the same animation for his moving, idle and attacking so all that is left on the Bugger now is his death animation, which is low priority and will be done if time allows it. next week I will work on the other enemy… (feel free to read in dramatic voice, mohahahah!!! lulz) … the Grubling.

 

Guess that’s all! hare så länge!

-Ludwig Lindstål

 

Suit Em’ Up – The random week

Hello World!

This week I was supposed to help Andreas (which are designer of our game-world) with the graphical parts of our “rooms”. Our game-world/suit is cut into smaller “rooms” so the computer doesn’t need to have the entire world in its memory at once but only loads the room the player is in and the surrounding ones. So, as said, I was supposed to help Andreas with our rooms. But he wanted to go for graphics for our menu system instead so we are going to do the rooms later, this resulted in me not working on one specific artifact this week but several and smaller ones.

Kind of what texture we’re looking for to use in our game. the search will be continued!

Instead for fixing our rooms I did some research after texture for our suit. There are two layers of our world. One inner layer which is the one you will walk around on, and one outer that is the suit’s outside which sets the paths for the labyrinth of our game. I’ve started on some of the textures myself, and will together with Andreas put them in to our rooms, but that will wait for maybe next week or so, simply when we have time for it.

the two enemy’s and all the Barney’s are my work, the rest is concept-art done by Måns from my group

I have also done some improvements on my animations. They are much smoother now and have a more biological appearance. Not as stiff as my first attempt at doing some animation. There are now 4 frames for each leg instead of only two and there is also a lot more details added to the enemy’s. One other thing on our animation-front is that finally we have some added in the real game, we have animation for one of the enemy’s (the green one) and a walking animation for Barney, our main character. So now the game doesn’t look as boring when there is a lot of movement going on, on the screen. We-ho!

This is a mock-up of what we wanted the map to look like, the red dot is where the player is. The map is just a suit due to our aesthetic goal; Exploring. the player  will not be given a full map of the suit because it reveals too much and lower the exploring game-play for the player.

Last of random work I did this week was a map for our menu-system. As the programmers was already finished with the code for it and we only needed the map-sprite I thought I could do it as well, since this week already is messed up with random tasks. Since the programmers already are done with the code of the map, I had some very strict rules to follow when making it. I had to draw it over our map, but not lose the proportions of it, nor make it too much offset from the map, which made the map look a bit weird.

This is how i had to do the map. it’s not finished jet but you’ll get the idea.

well. I think that’s all folk, sorry for a very diffuse post…will be better next week!

-Ludwig Lindstål

Suit Em’ up week 3 – Animation stuff

Hello!

This week I’ve focused on animation for our standard enemy’s. I think they turned out pretty good. There is still lots of details missing on these guys, but for pre-alpha and alpha it will do.

I’ve used Illustrator for drawing these characters (the same way as I drew Barney). The reason for using Illustrator is because of how I built our characters I can easy change the proportion, shape, color etc. of each part of the character which makes it easy to modify. So after the basic character is created I can change every individual part exactly the way I want and by duplicating the layers I can do small variations  that later will create an animation. Another reason for using Illustrator is that you can save the work in every resolution you want as Illustrator works with vector graphics. Right now our game is in 1280×720 but if we want to go with higher resolution it requires minimal work from the graphic artists on the characters of our game, which is nice!

To create the animation itself I used Photoshop cs6. As Illustrator allows you to export your files as PSD-files (Photoshop files) I could open my work in Photoshop with all my work and all layers as I left them ( only converted in to pixel-graphics instead of vector graphics as I exported them that way) and from there I created an frame-animation in Photoshop choosing which layers to show in each frame of the animation. To check if the animation look good I loop the frames. How the loop should behave in the code when it’s implanted depends on how the animations frames themselves are done. Right now I have two different types of animation. My green enemy for example is a loop animation, after the last frame the animation starts over from the first frame. My pink enemy is the opposite of a loop animation, after the last frame the animation starts to play backwards, and when it reaches the first frame again it plays normal again creating a pendulum animation (I don’t know if this is what you call them, but i think it makes sense calling them that, lol)

Until now, making a sprite-sheet have been a pain to do. I did save each frame as a separate PNG-file, then reopened them in Photoshop, placed them next to each other in a new Photoshop file, saved the new file and reopened that as well and then scale the new sprite-sheet to fit the game and then save it for the last time. then I had to manually pick out the coordinates for each frame for the programmers so the animation still looks good and doesn’t jump all around. Yesterday Simon showed me a free program making it much easier to convert a frame-animation to finished sprite-sheet with an automatic text document holding the coordinates of each frame. I haven’t tried it for any of our animations yet but it was really easy when i tried it out. This is gonna save me so much time. I’m gonna be at least twice as effective. wo-ho!

Heidoh!

-Ludwig Lindstål

2D 2 course

Waddap!?

The 2D 2 course just started last week, and there is not much to reflect about around the first week. Literally I learned nothing at all. It was the most random lessons I have ever attempted on. I cant even tell what they was about. Thankfully though, this week was a huge step up, still not what I wished it was, but in comparison. We went through perspective again and this was what I was able to create in 1,5 hours during the class.

 

The assignment was to draw an object in perspective, and in two versions where the angle of the camera is different from each other, and lazy as I am i picked the object closest to me (my Alienware) . I’m pretty satisfied actually when I think of how little time I spent on this, there is much improvements that can be done on this, but right now I don’t have the time to make a super detailed drawing. Suit em’ up is priority numero uno!

(And at the moment the graphic students haven’t got a minute of learning in how to create sprite-sheets, tile-sheets, animations etc. And by next week pre-Alpha shall be done for all the groups. I’m lucky as I know since before how to make all the graphical elements in a 2D game, but I feel sorry for the groups who don’t. This must be really hard time for them.)

That’s all folks!

-Ludwig Lindstål