Being shot

This week I have, among many other things, worked on an animation of the main character being shot. It turned out to be a rather tricky thing, I tried to imagine how the body would react if being hit by a bullet and tried to sketch it really fast. I experimented with movement in her arms, making them go up in front of her body but it did not look good at all and I soon realized that I should probably attempt a subtler approach.

This is a test that I threw together super fast to test how it could look if I tried showing the impact of the bullet in her arms, as you can see it did not look very well and after some additional attempts with the idea I decided to go in another direction.

The player experience needed to be more important than it being exactly accurate and since the game is already hard, and the fact that it is just outright annoying, it did not want to make the player have to wait and watch a long animation when being shot, instead of being able to flee. Therefore I thought of making something similar to the recoil of the animation I made of her shooting a rifle, it is clear and fast so the player gets the visual feedback of being shot and can quickly continue playing.

As usual I think it would have been good to have reference photos, instead I tried searching Google and YouTube for people getting shot, although I was a bit reluctant to check most of them out since I was a bit concerned about what I would get to see. I did find a video tutorial for special effects where I got to see someone acting that I thought I could draw inspiration from.

Then I started drawing up my recoil-idea, trying to feel the movement in my own body. I decided to push her body to the side and back and her head forwards and downwards. This was to simulate her taking a bullet in her right shoulder/side from the front. Once I got the idea down the animation was actually really simple. The challenge was to make it look like she was being hit while keeping it subtle enough not to irritate the player. This was also a reason that I chose to not move her arms much as I thought having her arms flapping about would only be annoying and over the top, especially when she is so small on the screen. Less is more was my key words when creating this animation.

Here is how it turned out when finished in colour.

If I was to do this again I would study more references and I think I should probably create additional animations, e.g. her being shot from the back but all in all I am happy with what I have created.