Third blogpost, DEATH!

Time for the third blogpost! Last week, I described how I had been redoing our animation. We started with a playersprite (sprite means picture, a single frame of an animation) that turned out to be the wrong size. We liked it and I did alot of animation with this sprite as the original. During our first playtest, however, we discovered that the sprite was too small and we tried to enlarge it but it looked out of focus. It looked terrible.

 

Thus I’ve spent well over thirty hours in total redoing all the different player animations and during this week I’ve mainly been redoing the death animation. My original death animation was the first animation I had ever done and it took me quite some time to do. It made me very proud, so it was soulcrushing to have to redo it. At the same time, I was glad to be able to remake it and put even more of my own touch into it andthis time it will be made from my own original sprite.

Below you have the two death animations, the left one is the new one and the right one is the old one.

At  first, I was tempted to simply duplicate the death animation exactly only using the larger image I had created. I kind of liked the little chip of the wing that breaks off and explodes separate from the rest of the plane. On closer examination ingame, I noticed that the player could be hit at any part of the plane when in a fight. Thus, it will look odd if it always loses it’s left wing. The forced remake of the animation gave me a golden opportunity to change this and I did. Now the plane starts burning from the mainbody, the part that will probably always be hit anyway. It can also be interpreted that the engine is catching fire. Both reasons seem more realistic than the player’s wing always getting shot off.  I also gave the plane more shading the further away it gets from the camera, since it is also getting further away from the lightsource. However, I did not change how the highlights and shadows move on each sprite as the plane turns even though they would, in reality. It would simply be too much work for something that happens almost too fast to actually see.

Perspective oh my gosh!

I also decided to create a new sprite of the plane where it is tilted slightly downwards. To do that, I once again had to wrestle with perspective drawing. I decided that it was a good excercise but sixteen hours of animating later, I almost changed my mind. Below, is one of the sprites of the plane going down but without the smoke. To the right of that you have the original plane sprite.

To do this I actually made a little model plane to look at as a demonstration of how perspective changes.. I put a ruler through an empty toilet paper roll and I tilted it foward and copied it. I added shadows to it to really tell the eye that the plane has changed perspective. I also added alot of details you would’nt be able to  see when the plane is strictly topdown. You can now see the round shape of the potato canon on the left wing, the shape of the boxes and the propeller spinning. The propeller is going to be changed in the final version of the game on each plane animation. We are going to put a “moving propeller animation” on top of the different player sprites because it would simply be too much work changing every sprite (including the enemy planes) on every single animation.