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!