VERTICAL SLICE
This week we didn’t have a group meeting until towards the end of the week, but that didn’t stop us from getting work done and communicating with each other.
At the beginning of the week I set about creating a turnaround for our monster character – I would’ve done this sooner in the project, but being the only animator assigned in the project I thought it best to focus on the main character that we see for 90% of the game than a monster we see at the very end for most of the project. It became apparent very soon though that I wouldn’t be able to do all the character animation myself, so I asked other art department project members if they wouldn’t mind helping me with animation if they had the time. Most of them were able to, so that took a burden off my back. So the 2D animated assets were consistent in style. I told them to hold out on animation until I created a turnaround.
With the turnaround done – and a walk and run cycle done for the detective character. I decided it was about time to create the idles for when our character stops. Next week during our weekly presentation we were told they’d like a short play of our game, so I wanted to at least have all the basics covered.
When we had our meeting we talked about what assets we needed left, and I was pleasantly surprised by the progress I was making so far, I feel I am making good time.
We had a small issue where the rough walk cycle we’ve been using the whole time was 128 x 128 in size, but the animations I was working on were 700 x 800 – so quite the difference in size. We thought I’d be okay to just shrink it down, but when I made the gif smaller myself to 128 x 128, most of the detail was lost. This was disheartening because I didn’t want all my hard work to just be for nothing because it fades away. I talked about it with my team members while we were in a meeting plugging the animations into Unreal and we figured out it would just be simpler at this point to just size up the entire environment, as it was still in the blocking out stage and it wouldn’t take much time and would preserve the quality of my animations.
These were all quite simple to do, and just took a while to complete. I have the sketch, lined and final version of each one!
Side Idle:
Front Idle:
Back Idle:
For next week I’m going to get a start on the front/back walk and run cycles!