Gameplay and Interactivity: Finishing My Sprites

Sprites, sprites, sprites. Whilst wonderful to create and watch come to life, I was happy to finish my contribution to the team.

I took the lead on 2 of the main villains of the piece - The red headed tattooed gent and the sportswear fiend.

I created the idle and fighting animations for the red headed character. This was a lesson in patience as what can seem like a quick job can change very quickly when playing through frames. It was difficult to get the right body posture when crafting his punch attacks. It was imperative that I created a sense of speed and to achieve this I used the classic animation techniques of speed lines. Streets of Rage was also a huge inspiration. Reflecting on this, I would have LOVED to have gotten a real arc of movement through his spine. Ewan brought to my attention a book devoted to classic animators techniques and this was very helpful.

Up next was the final villain in our demo game, our take on the sneaker head that queues outside Supreme stores when a new clothing range drops. At this point we were unsure whether or not he would make it into the final game demo, so I went for an idle and death animation. At the very least he can stand there and die in a cool way.

The death animation was probably the most fun I've had so far on this project. Coming up with grotesque ways of destroying a character was an absolute joy and I really wanted to push the gore level to compete with the fantastic animations George came up with. Intestines sliding out of his stomach should do the trick. This got a big laugh when the team saw it for the first time so I'd consider it a success.

Next on the agenda is getting some playable environments drawn up to test our mechanics!

Gameplay and Interactivity: Sprite Animation

Continuing with the Lead Character Sprite, the team debated as to whether we needed a walking animation or not. In the end we decided to have her navigate solely using the grappling hook and by riding on her sword. This was subject to change, but we felt strongly about this at the time.

With that in mind, I began crafting attack animations for our lead character. Firstly, the standard upwards slash. It looked a tad vanilla so after feedback from fellow course mates I decided to add a purple flame of energy emitting from the sword. This is consistent with the aesthetic we have built up until this point and adds to that feeling of momentum we have been pushing for. Depending on how this works in Unity, I may have to clean up the sheet by adding an extra frame or two.

Despite being a particularly laborious process, there really is a sense of achievement watching your character come to life. I felt strongly about taking the lead on the main character and it looks to have paid off.

Next up, the sword grind! Dan was particularly fond of this idea and it was cool imagery so why not! It is better to have a multitude of animations as insurance and at worst case it would be jettisoned if we couldn't fit it comfortably within the game.

This was a far easier process as the frames can just repeat on one another granting the illusion of movement and revert back to the idol stance very quickly without too much disruption.

Now to test in Unity and see what needs fixing!

UPDATE: After taking the sprite sheet into Unity and cutting it up, we had a lot of difficulty getting the animation cycle to work correctly in tandem with our attack button. It seems to skip a frame or two and then quickly revert back to the beginning. Frustrating as I'm brand new to this sprite business but continued bug testing will be necessary.

3D Art Production: UV Unwapping and Texturing

Looking at the feedback form for my initial Battle Arena, I lost marks based on the fact I dropped textures straight on to models without UV unwrapping them first. I lucked out on the more simple models, but more complex ones ( like my statue ) required proper unwrapping.


This was a laborious but rewarding process. It is simple enough to do with less organic shapes, but the head and torso were more difficult. I feel that seams on parts of my statue aren't where they should be, but this is a learning process. Stitching them together wasn't as difficult as I once thought, and it yields far superior results. There is still some stretching and that is something to consider for the next time.


For texturing I used a combination of Quixel and X-normal in order to get really solid results. Quixel worked a treat for me last time and this time it was much easier having proper UV maps to work from. I tried to be lazy last term, but this time round it worked very well. I went for a very basic weathered stone look to fit in with the general aesthetic of my arena. Some stretching is certainly visible on parts of the body like the hands but overall, I'm very happy with the model.

Visual Design: Brush Technique and Speed Paint

For this session we were tasked with using lower opacity and flow settings on our brushes to build up value and texture.


This is a technique I have been using for years now and I find it the most natural thing to do coming from a traditional painting background where you build levels and levels of colour and texture up to create something more tangible and realistic.


After this, we had to take on a speed paint replica of the Whale Boy by one of my FAVOURITE concept artists Bobby Chiu. He imbues such character and whimsy in his pieces - a far cry from the schlock of generic sci fi concepts.


Initially we had to just block in colours and around midway through, were given a more detailed reference image from which to paint details from.


This was a hell of a lot of fun!

3D Art Production: Animation

This week Phil introduced us to key framing animations in Maya. I've had previous experience of this in Unity when adding animated elements to my Battle Arena and as per usual, this seemed to be a far more in depth way of doing it. This was handy however, as although we aren't animating our characters this year, it did introduce us to basic animation after rigging a mode. Even if it was just a floppy tube!

Gameplay and Interactivity: Pause Script

Part of the brief stated that all members of the team had to produce one piece of production art for the game and one piece of script. My main strengths are in 2D production and concept art but after my first foray into the world of scripting, I was excited to contribute to the project.

I took control of the pause script. Although relatively basic and straightforward it is integral to nearly every game produced today and I felt confident enough that I could pull it off successfully and efficiently considering my art duties.

Getting the canvas UI to work correctly was a bit of a pain because I couldn't put it straight on to the canvas. I had to create a panel to place it on underneath. It was also a slight nightmare trying to get the panel alpha to act independently of its child element. After navigating these issues though, it was easily bound to the letter 'P' using an 'Input.GetButtonDown' command ( thankfully that was a bridge I crossed on the winter assignment with a torch).

Gameplay and Interactivity: Level Design

My aim with the background design was to create something visually beautiful in the vein of Dreamworks concept art, but not have it obscure the main characters and platforms. With a game moving as swiftly as Momentum, it was imperative that the background never detracted from what the player was trying to achieve.

The plan was initially to stick to one background and keep the palette very cool in order to allow the characters to 'pop' on screen. This was a joy to paint and allowed me to push my skills in a direction I'm not normally comfortable with.  We ended up making some of the trees interactive in various builds of the game to give the illusion of depth.

Dan added snow particles into the first few builds of the game but it caused the frame rate to stutter, which flew in the face of the very concept of our game. We couldn't afford the player to suffer any lag, so although it added another element of immersion we had to drop it.

I built the levels to be modular so that we could rebuild and repurpose levels on the fly. This meant less man hours if we were to push the game further along after completion of the assignment.

It was also very easy to add ambient lighting and change levels and hue's to create alternate levels. Our initial idea was to have the seasons and colours shift as the player progressed through the game but this ended up being a tad over ambitious. Below is an example of what I had in mind.

Visual Design: Colour Theory.

This week after watching a couple of YouTube tutorials detailing colour theory specifics, we were asked to apply this new found knowledge to a greyscale image of Yoda.

Below are my final images. The right hand image had to use a complementary and desaturated colour scheme, whilst the left hand image had to be more saturated featuring an analogous colour scheme.

Visual Design: Form Language

In class this week we watched another tutorial, this time focusing on form and it's language. It gave valuable insight into why things are shaped the way they are (familiarity, purpose etc) and how to apply that to vehicle concepts.


Upon finishing this, we were tasked with quickly sketching a set of digging vehicles. One set had to be using conventional, more angular shapes and the other, more organic shapes.


Early idea generation is one of my favourite parts of concept art as it tends to be the most liberating part of the process. As long as it falls within brief, no idea is too out there or conservative. In the end I worked up a more organic looking digger focusing on its bulbous shape and human silhouette.


Another enjoyable and quick exercise considering tech and mech aren't my favourite thing in the world to draw.

 

 

Visual Design: Tree

For this weeks assignment we were tasked with creating a tree with character. Unsurprisingly it is far easier to create a tree with the creep factor, than it is to create a happy whimsical tree.

I wanted to tie this task in with painting a landscape with fantastical elements, creating a narrative of sorts.

I painted three thumbnails to get a feel for mood and shape. I really wanted to create a tree that looked like it could come alive at any point to interact with the humans that discover it.

Frustratingly, I also had some great designs sketched out on post it notes, but the phone the pictures were taken on has subsequently died. Sigh.

I worked with 3 very different colour palettes. The end piece had a cool graphical element that I'd love to use in a future project.

After working on the concepts, I decided to go with an arachnid looking shape for my piece. I decided to make it a mix of horror and the fantastic, using colourful flowers to offset against the foreboding atmosphere. The most twisted Disney princess story you ever did see.

Overall I'm happy with the final image. It gave me an opportunity to use some new brushes and practice photobashing. I had to hand paint the star reflections on to the lake by the mountains which was laborious but necessary to have a coherent light source.

 I need to use less rim lighting and focus on using gestural strokes to build lighting across the image. This is certainly something to work on as I've noticed it across most of my work this year.

Gameplay and Interactivity: Animating Sprites

Now came the laborious part, animating the sprite. Using the timeline feature in Photoshop, I got started on the idle animation for our character. It was incredibly challenging to get the movement feeling natural, even with a simple breathing cycle. It was all about incremental changes from frame to frame. Trying to take shortcuts became abundantly obvious in the animation cycle.


Eventually I got it to a point that I was happy with. In the interest of time, I'll leave it where it is at for now, but there are some leg movements that don't feel particularly natural.