Final post for Potato Pirates!

Main menu without the buttons. The animation is just to show you guys that the clouds will move . This blog page can only upload things in potato quality so that’s why it is in potato quality. 

 

This week has been exhausting. Let me first apologize for the terrible grammar and spelling you’re about to endure. My trusty spellchecker, my girlfriend Victoria will not be able to proof read what I write this week so now you have to endure the train wreck that is my written English.

As I’m writing this it’s less then 20 hours before the final version of the Potato Pirates game is to be submitted. The work creating it has been exhausting and… So. Much. Fun! I’ve been animating like crazy, bossing around and crying blood at times, but it’s finally completed (well, close to being completed)!

This week I’ve been animating a potato drop menu (won’t go into that but it took me quite some time) and creating a new main menu. I’m not going to write about the drop menu, I’m just going to show it of, since it’s so cute. LoL.

Skriv en bildtext

What I am going to write about is the main menu scene I’ve made. It has taken me 20 hours to make and some stiff shoulders, but I’m quite happy with the result.

Our last main menu art was a couple of mountains. Clouds  were moving slowly from left to right. I was given the task to create a new such scene, but more detailed. The environment we have in the game is a landscape with mostly free nature, lots of grass, woods and mountains. So I made a main menu with lots of grass, woods and mountains…

First I was going to create the scene to look like it’s night time, but decided against it. In the game it makes sense since we use lights to show were enemies and points of interests are. In the main menu how ever I felt that a day scene would better show the quite features in the picture. A main menu scene in darkness felt so.. dark

I made the scene in two layers, one is the foreground and includes the two closest mountains and the field between them. The second layers include the mountains you see in the background and the field in front of them. By putting clouds between the layers, it will look like they are moving in the distance. The other clouds I made I put in front of it all, and they are moving across the picture slowly. In the gif I posted you can see how that clouds move, however it moves straight and very smooth in the game, not like it does in the gif (didn’t really have time, I’m sorry!).

I’ve used colors to help simulate perspective in the picture, and things get brighter the further away they are since the air between the eye and the object can bee seen!

Thanks for reading folks!

Post 5

This will hopefully be the last time I redo things in this death animation. I hate smoke but I hate animating smoke even more.

Shown here are the three death animations I’ve done so far for the player avatar and I’m still not entirely satisfied. I’ve described my workflow for each animation in previous posts, each describing me finally feeling done with the animation. Now here I am again.. think I might be a bit of a perfectionist?

First

second

Third

The first animation was made in the wrong format and when I redid it I added  perspective by tilting it downwards. I also made the plane spin downwards instead of just dropping like a stone. This was where my problems with smoke animation started. I felt that what ever I did, the smoke and fire looked glitchy and moved unaturally around the plane. To be fair, it looked really nice in the game since  the player plane spins even more than it does in the animation alone. The reason for that is, in an animation like this the plane has to be in the exact same position throughout the animation to later be moved by the  programmers as they see fit. If I hadn’t put the plane in the same spot throughout the animation, the gifs above would be as big as an A4 paper.

Redoing the smoke, I decided to first make a reference ring around the plane that the smoke would always follow throughout the animation. If you compare the second animation and the third you can see that in the third the smoke is moving in a tight circle compared to the  uncontrolled fire/smoke mix in the second animation.

The  exaggerated spin that the circle creates, works better in the game where the spin is pretty much 360 degrees, compared to  90 degrees it is in the gifs you see here.

Making these three animations have taught me a lot and making the smoke with these animations was a pretty easy and fast process. I made one smoke cloud and copied it. The further the plane moves the more copied smoke clouds are released. When the plane actually hits the ground and the explosion starts  there is a total of twelve small clouds put together. All while following the reference ring I started with, to make sure the smoke followed the path I wanted. A new layer above the I created a new layer on top of the  copied clouds  so I could draw on  them to make them appear connected  and hide the fact that the clouds are identical.  This was the finishing touch. I’m not sure if I like the second or the third one best though…

Thats all for this week and hopefully this !?=()/# death animation! 😀

(PS. I think I keep redoing it because I like it so much)

Blogpost Four!

Another week of animation! Since last week I have had so much fun with the new death animation for the player plane. This week I got to do the death animation for the blimp, or the “Led Zeppelin” as it’s called. Erik Levin in our group made the Led Zeppelin’s moving animation and art in the game. It was up to me to make his nice blimp blow up. Fine by me mohahahaha.

Erik’s blimp, now this is gonna be fun to blow up!

 

So how does a blimp explode? It doesn’t crash like a plane does, the only blimp crash I know of is the Hindenburg and I wanted to avoid  connection to that as much as possible. Our game has a comic tone to it anyway which would not go well with the Hindenburg reference. Instead, I chose to have a more comedic crash than a realistic one. Also, this blimp is not filled with anything flammable…

 

So how does a blimp crash comically? I decided to think of the blimp not as a blimp but more like a giant balloon. So what happens to a balloon if it would be pierced by a small potato (we shoot potatoes in the game)? My first thought was to make it fly away and deflate, like a balloon you let go of after you inflate it. However, such an animation would take me quite a long time and time is kind of scarce so I chose the other posibility. The balloon would just pop with a bang! The blimp also has a cabin on it’s belly so I decided to simply let that cabin drop straight downwards. Since the blimp moves so slowly, it would make little sense if the cabin would fly off in any other direction. Besides, it looks even more comical when it drops like a stone.

 

 

Since time was not on my side doing this and it’s the third animation I’ve done this week, I decided to play with photoshop and avoid as much new art as possible. I took the old sprite (image) and simply cut it up in a lot of, what is called in photoshop, layers. Once I had all those in layers I could simply move them a little away from the explosion and make them more transparant the further along the animation goes. I also added the little explosion which is made with two circles. First frame, the two circles are fairly small with a touch of motion blur to them. Second frame, I’ve enlarged the circles and added even more motionblur. The cabin was simple, I just made it smaller in every frame while at the same time making sure it’s positioned at the same exact spot.
Thats all for this week folks!