Tutorial Level

My next task was making a Tutorial Level. It was Warren's task but he had heaps to do, and it could be simple, so I did it. I played around with photoshop and illustrator and worked with glowing lines. Looks pretty simple, but took me a while, haha, maybe I'm just slow.

All I did was one asset that could be repeat in different sizes and one background, I made them in these colours first but the grey just looked like a faded black.

So I changed it to a more defining black.

Idle Animation

So yeah, characters that are static when Idle look lame. Due to this, I decided to make an Idle animation for the fox. Here is my little development:

This was my first attempt. I really struggled with understanding what movement you do when you are just still breathing. I tried a little chest and shoulders movement, but it still looks static and lame.

Then after that I went for forearms, arms , shoulders and after playing around with it I started getting somewhere. I also added a little blink as a nice touch :) However, I still thought there was something off. And I figured it out! The head wasn't moving.

Boom!

Shooting, Glide, Bullet Collision

So after drawing the explosion I realised the there was a lot that I could improve on my character. I already had the technique down, it was just a matter of applying it to whatever I could.

The way I did it was, I had this blue sphere with an outside glow and I followed the explosion pattern, going from a dark outline to a strong white colour in the middle.

Then I used the warp tool to add motion aesthetic to the sphere. 

I created several versions until I was happy with it

This is what it looked like in the end:

Here is the animation:

Then I did the same for the collision, used the same sphere, just a different pattern

Same deal with the collision of bullets between robots and character

Animation:

Then I figured: "Might as well change the glide as well and make it all consistent!

And so I did

Animations:

Token

Mohsin has started coding a collection of tokens that we can later on turn into an upgrade for the character, not sure what yet. He needed a drawing to start making it so I made him this really horrible looking token, but then Warren drew one that I really like and I grabbed it, redrew it, and animated it.

This is the one I quickly drew for Mohsin, don't judge me yet! It gets better

Then I grabbed warrens drawing and made this one

I made each sphere as a different layer rotating around the token

Then I added lightnings inside it

Next step was to have each surrounding sphere to change size

I was happy with it but I thought it was a little bit skippy, so I doubled the amount of frames

I also made an animation for when the token is collected

Respawning Animation

Craig suggested we have a re spawning animation so that our game looks cooool. So I started working on in. The process was kinda similar to drawing the explosion but much easier. I drew a yellow outline around the character fading into white and then played around with different shapes, a nice amount of frames for a build up.

This is how it turned out, I was stoked with the outcome:

This one has a little blink at the end just before it becomes the character

This one is better as it smoothly fades into the character

New Robot Explosion

So, a few times, making a new explosion was suggested. By tutors and friends. Michael was in charge of doing it because he has a really nice drawing style but he got a bit busy with his world map. I decided to do it since we really needed it. I recently got a drawing tablet and it was time I put it to good use. Here follows the development:

I found that explosions have a dark outline and fade into a very bright colour, where the explosion is actually happening. It was a bit tricky getting that nice aesthetic. I started using similar colours to real explosion.

Then I moved on to blue since the energy sphere that the character throws is blue.

Drew it several times until I really understood the core essence of the drawing.

Then I used the Warp tool from Photoshop to add little sharp explosions in it too.

This is how it turned out : D

Dying Animation

Next thing I worked on was a dying animation for Omnix. One where he falls through the screen, like many other 2D games. It was pretty easy to do, I just closed his eyes and made about 5 frames of his falling on back towards the groud.