Week 7
This week I continued with pretty much my own work exclusively, that being more player animations and more tracks for the game.
I am once again amazed at just how time consuming animation is, it makes more and more sense why dev teams have dedicated artists and thankfully I have Samuele managing a lot of the programming problems people on the programming side were having.
During my time spent animating this week I fully figured out how I want the gameplay to look, I want the gameplay to be fast with little down time and so I remembered an indie game I played recently that had gameplay where the player was like a glass cannon, you the player could kill any enemy in one hit and equally so the enemies could kill you in one hit. This would add to the sense panic the players already have of completing the level before they melt and are sent back to the beginning.
So with this gameplay loop in mind I now need to create some very snappy death animations for the player that include a hit animation, a melting animation as well as a respawn animation.
For the respawn in particular to be a sort of reverse of his melting animation, this will be quite whimsical and unnatural looking which weirdly would look natural on a character like this.
These animations will draw the most attention again to the exagerrated head of the character by having his head drop and melt while everything else in his body just sort of vanishes.
And so the above are the completed animations, I showed these to members of the team and they were met with no criticisms and so I am very happy with how they turned out. I decided for the hit animations to give it sort of a look as if he was getting popped as often times if the player is being hit it would be because they bran into spikes or an enemy. Upon the completion of these animations it convinced me that this is the perfect player design for this.
Moving on to the music side of things I decided to make another track for the second level using the same sort of formula I used to create the track for the first level. I once again dug up my Akai midi keyboard and started off by playing a 4 minor chord progression in G minor. Same synthey vibe as the last one however wanted this one to be a bit more mellow as I am thinking of this level as like a cave city type of level. I then got out the session drummer built into logic pro as I do not own a drumkit and some more flex and flow brass samples and this was my result.
This is a song I feel like I would listen to even outside of the context of a video game so overall I am very happy with how it turned out.
These tasks took me quite a while so there was a lot practical work and not a whole pile of research and and brainstorming outside of the look i gave into Katana Zero. I am so tired after doing these but next week should be no different as there is still loads that needs to be done.
Tasks at Hand
- Continue with game sounds and animation there is still things that need to be done.
- Check in with other team member and see if their tasks are going ok.
- Prepare a presentation of our game for week 9 to be presented in the lecuture.
What I Learned
- Balancing being producer as well as other jobs is hard as I did not even have time this week to check in with my team.
- The systems I have going now in terms of how i make animations and music though are time consuming work and with them I am ble to create very good things.