Reflection #8

For this week of game design I have been doing the creation of some of my sprite assets, animations as that has been my focus for this week.

Image of my goblin in its basic pose.

Here you can see I have made a sprite sheet for my goblin as I have made its default running animation for him to run and attack at the tower. This took me a while to do as I had to replace each pixel by pixel to make this work as it was the best method I found if I wanted to make it into a more detailed animation as appose to what I tried to do and test which was to re scale it and just move the arms and legs in a rotation as well as making the head bob a bit. Taking it apart pixel by pixel by pixel was better as it help me add subtle details such as the rag movement as the goblin runs.

This is my new version of my 2d cyclopse which I have so far decided on as the other version I found was a little harder to animate plus the main reason of why I have changed the cyclops design is that the other characters are facing in different positions so it would not make much sense if he was facing the wrong way. I have changed the colour of the cyclopes as I think it would be more appealing with its bright colours as appose to its more darker and harder to look at version from before, I have even included to add some spikes on his club to make him look a little more menacing as I could not figure out a good way to make the club look better than it does.

Version 1.0

Version 2.0

After that however I thought Id change the spiked club all together as it just didn’t fit well in my opinion so I changed it out for an axe which I think is the right choice as I am satisfied with that. I also added and eyebrow or mono brow for a cyclops to give him the appearance to look a little more angry in his look as well as his new colour of a red eye to add to his character. I also added some small subtle shading details to add to the character to make them more detailed and polished for the game.

Version 2.1

At the top left of this image you can see the colour pallet of all the shades and colours to what I used on the cyclops.

Cyclops sprite sheet

After I was settled on my cyclops look I then went onto making its animation which I made a total of 8 frames for its walking/running animation for it main one. However after looking back at the animation I noticed a problem with the leg movement were the cyclopse seemed to move his leg forward a bit too unnaturally fast between frames 4,5,8 and 1 so I decided to add a couple extra to make it more polished.

In the end I ended up with a total of ten frames and I shall make an attack animation and then it should be done in terms of its animations, if I have time Ill add an extra animation for all the characters were they flash red as they are being damaged. Not just that while I worked on this animation and sprite sheet I adjusted some couple subtle details to version 2.1 such as the cyclops now holds his axe a little higher up than right at the bottom now.

The only problem I have ran into this week is that when I put my cyclopes into unity after I sliced the sprites up so I could make the animation in the sprite editor and put him into the scene there was a visual problem. The problem was that during the animation the cyclopes had got blue colours onto him which he did not have before which kept popping on for some unknown reason, my dragon has also experienced this problem as well as I have found as the dragon has some pink coloured pixels on him which I did not put on before but is there in unity.

Here is what my cyclopes looked like in unity.

Fortunately I managed to figure out the problem which was that there was compression put onto my images so it blurred the colours together all I had to do to fix the problem was to turn the compression from normal to none at all and the images resumed back to how I made them. I then duplicated the two times and organised them out in my main menu scene to give more visual as to how the game looks to the player.

Here is the image of cyclopes’s which has been fixed.

Image of my updated main menu.

What I am planning on doing for this next week is continuing to make the sprites and their animations and my goal is to have them all done for the end of next week so that my remaining weeks can be focused on unity and  its coding for the remaining seven weeks of the college time as well as the time during Easter Holiday.