Tuesday Update

It has been a while since my last post now, much due to the workload of our current courses. As expected I did not finish the animations I had planned on completing last week. I did manage to finish the sneak animation although it is still colourless, an effect that was very much appreciated in the game. We had not originally planned on having her colours look different when sneaking but considering the strong visual feedback it provides we are thinking about ways of adjusting and keeping the effect and enforcing our comic book theme. We are considering options like having her in her normal colours and making her semi-transparent, giving it the dot-effect sometimes seen in comics or perhaps just leaving it in outlines. This, along with many other things, will have to wait until after the Alpha though, which is this Friday.

During the weekend I tried to do some catching up on my other tasks, I finished a shooting animation, using a handgun, except for the colouring and got started on the one for shooting a rifle. I did not get very far on the rifle one as I did not have a weapon sprite to work with and i found it difficult to get the proportions right with my provisional weapon since I do not have that much experience of weapons.

As usual I referenced the photos we have previously taken to get a base for proportions and pose and then started constructing the body to finally add clothes on top of it. The aiming of the weapons was pretty straight forwards, as I said tricky with the rifle, getting the length of the weapon and her left arm right, it would probably have been easier with better reference photos. The next challenge was to animate the recoil, I searched Google and Youtube for videos of women shooting similar-looking weapons to see their impact on the body. Mainly I focused on trying to find videos of women who are not experienced with weapons and I ended up finding some useful ones which I looked at again and again.

When shooting the handgun I noticed that the upper body and head went slightly back and that the gun and lower arms went upwards, for some unfortunate women it ended up in their faces, that felt a little extreme though. Instead I moved her head and body a little bit and changed the perspective on the arms and gun, after a lot of additional tweaking it came together pretty nice. Animating the recoil of the rifle was a bigger challenge, much due to previously mentioned reasons. I wanted it to look different from shooting the handgun, pushing her shoulder back rather than moving up. The first version was a bit too cautious with the recoil so I pushed her shoulder back a little further and moved her head back and a little bit up as I noticed this behaviour when looking at the Youtube-videos.

I managed to finish the rifle one today and did the colouring of both of them, which took me a very long time since our coders want the clothes and body separately - meaning many many layers. According to our Lead Programmer the best way to do the character sprite sheet, since we are going to incorporate both disguises and different types of weapons, is to draw all frames of her body without clothes. That means the clothes have to be drawn and saved separately to be used as a layer, same goes with the weapons as they are their own object in the game and not part of her animation. Since her head and hair is supposed to partly cover both weapons and clothing, that as well will have to be in separate frames on the sprite sheet. This will perhaps come in handy though as we have mentioned the possibility of separating her head from her body to make her look in the direction of the mouse, making her look more alive. It is a lot more tedious work for us artists but I will have to trust our very talented Lead Programmer when he says it is the best way to make the game flow well.









Well that was a minor essay and I still have so much more to discuss, I guess it will just have to wait for another day and hope I get the time to blog more often. I thought I would end this with showing you how the shooting animations turned out.

*I see now that there is one layer missing in one frame, I will have to fix that later.