I began working on animating our Sea Bunny guide character for the player as we were advised to start properly developing our assets. I started out with animating the hologram pop up that the Sea Bunny character appears in, deciding to use a boiling technique on the lineart to connote that digital aspect of the character.
I decided to keep the talking animations simple on purpose as I had in mind that they are very limited in their movements due to being a digital character. My main inspiration for the talk sprites was Paper Mario as seen below and how simple the characters animations are.
Below are progress exports of the idle and speaking animation cycles for the three main expressions for my Sea Bunny.
Neutral-
Happy-
Sad-
In addition, I had also completed a glitching sprite for the Sea Bunny as our group had the idea for a minigame to be fixing the comms line, and until then the Sea Bunny would glitch out and not be able to guide the player.
Glitching Animation-
Original Glitching Concept-
Lastly, I also worked on pop up animations for the hologram this sea bunny character would appear in on screen. I had two separate ideas for how the pop up animation could work, settling on version 2. Both versions of the hologram pop up can be seen below as progress exports.
Version 1-
