During week 6 we had another presentation to show our current work to our lecturers and class.
The teachers suggested that we should be a little further along, and to aim to get some more things done for the game for next week for some playtesting.
As for my individual feedback, I was suggested that since I’m deciding to go with hand-drawn animation after all, to maybe reduce the amount of spots on the giraffe design. The gopher form was solid, but the elephant’s form wasn’t as strong and I got feedback to fix the legs (as they were rounding off too soon), make the back legs thicker to match the front legs, and adjust the head, making it a bit bigger and moving it forward – which I all changed later on.
As for the death animations, I was suggested to consider whether it’s always the same animation no matter what falls on it, and perhaps consider having the objects that fall down all be a similar size to reduce the amount of variations in animation I would have to do.
I was feeling at this point like we were all a little unorganised with the project so we would benefit from having a call, going through each level and specifically clarifying what each level concept is, and what needs to be done each step of the way.
I created this document for us to keep track of what assets we needed, which was very handy for us to all be on the same page about things. https://docs.google.com/document/d/174O_3ykq4CVLDT3lYbiIvK7vc8bat3x-UuoMHNwkMz4/edit?usp=sharing
I also established with Dave just to make sure how far up specifically the water was going to go up on this level and where the window was going to be.
We also came up with some new concepts together, such as there being a big bath plug to unplug in the level, and although it was a creative idea, we later cut this due to the workload.
We eventually decided against the water level entirely due to the fact that this would significantly increase everyone’s workload, as it would need entirely new and unique assets and not many assets could really be reused.
I also did some more research into GUI this week, as I had been assigned with this role at this point – I put together some references to try take inspiration from some games I liked.
Some games such as Friday Night Funkin’ and Scratchin’ Melodii I felt specifically matched the kind of style we were going for. I also took some more reference from Mario Wonder as I really liked its compact UI design. With Ultrakill, I liked the way when you finished a level, it showed your rankings as you were falling to the next one, and I felt this could be a cool idea for Rickety Reserve.
Some sketches and concepts I created as possible GUI design (some of them were very rough at this point):
Then during week 7, I focused more so on career research, which I will write about more in my blog for assignment 3. I was having some difficulty this week as well, as this year I’ve generally struggled quite a bit with my mental and physical health.
However, as my lecturer suggested doing, I did check in with the games design students to see which animations I needed to prioritise.
This was also the week where we created a Trello to keep track of which things we all needed to get done, which helped me a lot during the rest of the project.
I also got some feedback on my logo exploration this week.
But I decided to put the logo focus on hold for now, as the other aspects of the project were more important.
The next weeks were also a bit of a struggle for me, however I did get some more work for the project done.
First, I finalised all of the designs for the animals in the game.
I finally fixed the elephant design based on the feedback I had gotten a few weeks back.
I do think I could have added a little bit more roundness to the legs, however overall I think this design is an improvement.
Then, continuing on with the rest:
I broke the rule of the joined eyes with the toucan and cockatoo designs as I was struggling to find a way to make it look appealing. I realised later that this was partially because I had turned their heads completely sideways in these drawings, so naturally the double eyes looked out of place. I decided to revise this later on when I would be animating them.
After completing all of these, I realised the volume of animals that there were for me to animate. I asked the team which animals they felt were the most important so that I could prioritise them in case I didn’t have the time to animate everything, and at the time we decided on the giraffe, elephant and polar bear (somehow completely forgetting about the lion at the time).
I also did some studies on animal walks and the way that animals overall move during the break. I rewatched the lecture way back from the Animation Studio module which helped me a lot, as well as doing plenty of my own research.
https://youtu.be/DmGlaKeLBVY?si=AAusyxY8SZ2tq2tX
I think that what helped me the most with learning the basics of animal walks was this page from The Animator’s Survival Kit:
I used it to create a practice animation of a dog walking, intended to be rockruff, a pokemon I like. Of course each animal has its nuance in its walk, but I felt that this was a good place to start in terms of learning the basics.
I didn’t completely finish it but it helped me with learning more about the quadruped walk cycle, and I felt a lot more confident approaching the animation for the rest of the animals now.