BA3B ♪ RHYTHM OF THE GODS ♪ WEEK 6
08:03This week, I took a short while away from the studio to help Sharon with Cosplay Life Drawing for Year 2 Interchange. Although we didn't have quite as big a turnout as last year, it was really enjoyable to model for the second years and see how they worked.
When I returned to the labs, I started to pitch in with environments. Sophia gave me her base environment concept art, and I experimented with colours over the top of it;we ended up going for colours similar to the warmer, brighter colours of the second image, with some minor alterations.
After this, Sophia requested some help with animating the water for the environment, so I began to work on that. I hadn't animated water very much before, and much less in pixels, so I started looking up examples of water animations.
from Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky
These images had a similar composition to the background that we were aiming for, and as such worked well as points of reference. I did have trouble animating Sophia's background at first as each 'pixel' was not a pixel but made up of 3x3 squares, so I initially tried to animate by moving the layers around separately of one another to create the impression of movement.
However, after looping these together in a gif, I realised this did not work well, and was choppy.
Just when I was stuck on how to go about this animation, Sophia needed to change the water image, and so my working on this animation was put on hold for a short while. This also meant that I had extra time to figure it out!
During this week, I also made in-between frames that helped the slide and block animations for the protagonist become more fluid-looking. These were simple smears based heavily on the first and last sprites of the action animations that bridged the gap between the run cycle and the action.
While they may not look like the most elegant images on their own, I think these two simple frames add a lot of personality and fluidity to the animations!
We also talked to Steven Huckle about our idea of forming an indie company, and received a lot of really helpful advice regarding finding space and funding. We also set up the meeting with Beth and Sarah from the Ideas Factory, and the concept of a games hub for graduates was proposed by Tom Ellis, so we had something else to discuss with them. A meeting with a solicitor was also scheduled for the following week, to discuss any questions we might have about the legal side of things. The staff at the Ideas Factory suggested that we put together a list of things that we would want from the Games Hub if the project were to go through, so we started to collaborate on a list of what equipment and software we would like to have, as well as the prices for each, in preparation for these meetings.
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