Overview:
This week we covered the first half of the 12 principles of animation and were tasked to make a sprite sheet consisting of a player with a walk, idle, and jump animation, and 2 enemies with walk and attack animations, that implemented them.
The Principles:
These are the sprites I ended up making.
The first principle is squash and stretch. I think this was best implemented in my slime as it has both squishing and stretching as it jumps and lands, making it seem more fluid and dynamic rather than remaining a solid shape the whole time.
The second is anticipation, which is demonstrated in all 3 of the characters, with the pizza guy crouching before jumping, the slime squishing down before bouncing up, and the purple guy having his arm do a full arc to throw the rock not just throwing it from the top straight away.
The third was staging but as this is just a sprite sheet and there isnt really any environment or viewpoint to stage the sprites within.
The fourth is pose to pose and straight ahead animation. I used a combination of these throughout my sprites, using mainly straight ahead but on a few sprites creating key frames and filling in the gaps to make the animation smoother.
The fifth is overlapping action and follow through. I tried to implement this in the purple guy’s walk animation although it isnt very obvious. The plan was to have his arms drag behind as he walks and have him pull them back up to their normal position when his feet are in a neutral stance but the limited space of the 32×32 grid limited that a bit. There is also follow through after the jumping animations with the crouch after landing before the character springs up again back into their neutral position.
The sixth is slow in slow out. I struggled implementing this as these sprites were not animated. However, I tried to make the frames more concentrated towards the beginning and end of the jump actions as they seemed to work the best with the principle.
Overall:
Overall I think this went quite well as the sprites, while pretty simple drawings, relatively effectively demonstrated the main principles of animation or, at the very least, led me to further understand how they worked and what I need to do different to better use them next time.