Problems

I've ran into a lot of problems before the demo, the designer started importing the gifs into construct and first problem i came across is that all the gif sizes are different; if you scaled them then they would go blurry. to fix that i went into adobe flash and tried to scale them all to 300 by 300 pixels, another problem i ran into was that the flash files won't open properly since i used different versions of flash, so instead of wasting time scaling each frame, I decided to make a rig for the character, and I made sure each aspect of the character was a symbol so i could create motion tweens.

Creating attackmation

So I started working on one of the attack moves, I didn't really plan this out, I was experimenting with random sketches when I stumbled upon to this idea of making it a beam attack. I let you see for yourself.

This is how the end result is, it took a lot of time because I had to mess with a lot of different settings, change formats and import the frames 1 by 1 into photoshop, just so I could enhance the visuals.

The different stages of the animations;
I first started this in flash CS3, where I basically had drawn a rough sketch of all the frames, just to get a good idea of where everything will go when I'm done. Then I went over the sketch frame by frame till all the lines were right, I had some limbs that would not move and so I change the whole character into a symbol so I could move it more smoothly, I used motion tween (this is way of making an object move from point a to b smoothly) on the hands for part of the way, so it looks way smoother.

here is what it looked like when I was done in flash, so the next step was to add colour and remove the floor.

So all the colours are flat at this moment, and when I say colours I really do mean colours because the hands and feet are supposed to be white so they actually show up on the backgrounds. Then I had to spend time on finding out how to export it to photoshop, after some time I got it to work in photoshop where I went and added the finer details such as the shadow that shows up when the beam starts, that's because the beam does emit light, also I added a red glow to the back of the beam so it's easily visible and gives it more of an aggressive feel.

Style of art

following my previous post, I have continued to work on different styles to see what looks best, in my last post I said that stick animation is more fluid, it's simple to do but takes patients. I spoke to my team, they said I should decided what we use for the game, so I think I'll pretty much discard this style of animations, seeing as it won't fit in with the backgrounds from the other artist.

This is a the walk cycle for the character we will use, I might change the colours around a bit, and also make another similar character that will be player controlled. For this animation above I didn't want to keep re-drawing the head so I basically converted it into a symbol and all the other moving parts into 'graphics'. This saved me sometime, but i think if i had drawn it by hand it would have taken more time but would have a unique flow to it.

For all the animations I draw a floor, before I start drawing because then I can align everything easily.

This was a stomping move, it was one of the attacks i thought we might use, but this was the sketching stage and i decide to drop this attack animations, because that looks way better.

This is one of the special moves, and I shall refine this animation more after I am done with my current animation, this movement is the same as my pitch, but it'll be more fluid than this.

Week 2

We got into groups now and I have to design the characters for the project, in my  team we have 2 artists so we can have more detailed animations and such. I will be designing the new characters, we had a group meeting where we discussed different parts of the game/ elements. My team suggested we keep the characters as spheres/ovals and just change their appearance a little bit. I told the designer that I will get some ideas down and show him each and every idea, this way we will be able to see which one would work best for our game.

 So I started doing some animations in flash, because it's much easier than photoshop and the animations are more fluid and smooth; I started with a stick man animation which was really smooth and I thought would look great in a beat 'em up game because you would be able to see all the joints, hands, feet and the head. however that would mean that we change the art style of the game, also I don't want anyone to think that I was too lazy to make a proper character. one last note about the stick style is that, I have seen flash which just used stick men but the way they were presented made them much more than that, for example there are a series of flash fighting scenes where two stick men fight to death, the punch and the whole fight in general looks believable.


 This is the same style as my pitch GIF, this kind of style can work for a fighting game, this is beacuse i've seen a flash game called "smiley wars" which is basically circles killing other circles with guns. I can do this style easily, but it's not as believable as the stick men.



I can still repersent differenct characters on screen by giving them a different experession and or changing their colour. I might have to make a whole different character, beacuse I want to see what looks best and what performs best.

Week 1

Today I started working on my loop animation for the presentation that will take place in a month, I don't really have any idea of what i want to make, all i know is that it has to be a pixelated GIF.

I got some ideas down for what i would like to show everyone, i wanted it to be something that represented me in a way that tells everyone that I'm good at both animation and visuals. So I got inspiration from another game (street fighter) due to the catchy phrase for one of the moves; 'Hadouken', however that doesn't really show the character moving around, so I decided to do another move from that game, 'shoryuken' which is an upper cut.

I didn't want to spend too long on this so i didn't add too much detail into the character, i thought that was unnecessary. I wanted it to be simple because i knew, i would have to draw it frame by frame. If it was too complex then it would take more than one week.

My design looks like a sphere/oval with little circles for hands and feet. It's simple but you can still show movement with the hands and feet. I didn't really think about the colour when i started this but, after i was done drawing each frame I went in and add different shades of grey to make it seem more 3d/ give more depth.

Before adding the victim who gets punched, I animated the punch for 24 frames with a 0.1 frame delay, this would make sure that each frame is visible but not too slow. I just animated the motion of the uppercut with no effects (the blue glow and the blood or the victim), after that process was done I went and added neon blue glow and streaks to the hand as the punch was being unleashed, then I wanted a victim and so I made him stand out by giving him a bright yellow with shade and red spikes. I animated the victim to walk up and get hit just at the right time, I spent even less time on this second character because he would only be in the scene to get punched.

After I was done with the characters, I wanted to do a simple background because currently it was on a white background and it didn't look finished, also I wanted to show that I can do a bit of backgrounds as well so I decided to draw in some trees and clouds. Finally I went and colour corrected everything, added blurs where they were needed for example the streaks of the upper cut and the glow of the sky, clouds and the shadow near the tree trunks.
I was mostly proud of this GIF, considering the amount of time I spent on it.