Overview:
This week we had to make basic sprite animations for our Platformer prototype. These would be the player’s walk and idle animations, the enemies’ idle animations and some blocks and scenery for the rest of the game.
Inspiration and Process:
For the player character, I made up a random creature that I thought could be quite friendly looking and cute. The design is partially inspired by the Furi from Moshi Monsters as I thought the long back-dragging arms were a nice touch. I also gave it an attempt at a bow tie but that turned out to be quite hard with only about an 8×4 pixel area to work with.
For its animations, I made them simple 4 frame ones, with the idle being the character looking and turning different directions as if deciding where to go next. For the walking animation, I tried to make it have a little skip rather than a walk similar to Skips from Regular Show as he walks in that kind of way.
For the enemy I tried to implement some shape language with the sharp eyes and ears. Seeing as these enemies are static in the game, I didnt give it a walk animation and instead make them blink, which I think turned out ok.
Each animation on both characters was primarily made by duplicating the previous sprite and adapting it to the next part of movement, whether that be altering eye openness and direction, generally where the sprite is facing, or the legs trying to portray movement. Using the duplications made there be a sense of continuity between the frames that allowed for easier looping.
Improvements:
I think the main improvement among these would be adding more frames to allow for more exciting movements and animations rather than very simple walking and blinking and maybe allowing for arm movement or more advanced walking.
Overall:
Overall I’m pretty happy with the art and animations this week, there was definitely room for more depth and advancement in the animations but there is plenty of time to practice that in my own time and when we cover animation more in depth.