This week I have continued on the animations. One of the animations I have made this week was a run animation for the guard. This run animation is going to be in the chase state when the guard has detected the spy.
So I started by modifying the walk animation to see how it might look. I did this by removing some frames, but that made it look like the guard was walking really fast. I mixed around a bit with that. Then I got the suggestion to make the guard show more back since when you run you lean forward a bit. So I started making more back visible and moving the head forward, but it still did not look like the guard was running. I started looking at the movement of the body for when a person is running. Not only does the person lean forward some but the movement I the shoulders are much larger so I twisted the guard more so that the movement became bigger. It still did not look right so I changed the arms so that instead just showing the elbow when the arm comes backwards in the movement of the arm the whole arm extends backwards as well. I could have been sitting with it for more hours, but I decided to see how the run animation differed from the walk animation and realized that they differed enough so I could move on to the other animations.
So one more animations I have been working on this week is the guards alerted animation. This animation is the guard supposed to have when he knows the spy exists, when he have spotted the spy or lost sight of the spy. Some of the first ides was that the guard would change color or get a glow, but it was pretty soon decided that that kind of thing did not go well with the general feeling in the game. So then the idea that was decided long before I started sketching on it was that we should have an exclamation mark. The style in having exclamation marks would have been grate together with the style of our game. Though when I started sketching on it we realized that we could not use exclamation marks since our game is from right above, everything is straight from above so an exclamation mark would look weird. So I thought how could I make it look like the guard is alerted without making a glow or something like it. I came up with this:
This is an unpolished version, but it’s the idea. I have toyed around with these yellow and orange pieces. I have made animations were all goes smaller then bigger and an animation where they move to make a bigger impression. I am not pleased with them so I am still experimenting with it.
Queen 