putting her face on

Sooo my last update was the idle animation.
I have added more frames to the animation to make it look smoother as requested by Peter and I have to say, he's right, it looks much better now. ^_^ .

I also went through the walk and run animations to add make up to Steph's face to match the detail of the idle.

I think the make up looks really nice on Steph, she looks young and nice. :)

I'm really happy with how the walk has worked out, however my favourite has to be the idle. Her tapping foot is rather funny, she looks really annoyed :P as she should be.

I need to work on how I will get her to change from idle to walk and how walk will change to run :S

I have some ideas for the walk to run animation, nothing big maybe 2 frames as I tried to get the walk and run pretty close in movements to prepare myself for this day.... (thank you past me).

I need to make a crashing into block animation too..... D: so much to do! hmmm

So, I'm going back to work now.....

Idle

Idle hmmm now this could be referring to me or Persephone...... :v

:P I'm finding rather hard to motivate myself to actually work on these animations... I know what I have to draw I just can't bring myself to draw it.... D: my drawing has run dry! but I'll live, I am slowley getting there, slooooooooowley but surely.

I have been working on Steph's (Persephone) idle animation. This will be used before the game has started, the animation will be just standing on screen tapping her foot for now, if I have time/motivation later on I will hopefully ad more to her idle movements. However for now, we will stick with the basics.

On the idle I really focused on the face to give her character. The eyes I tried to make simple but pretty, and I tried to go for an innocent youthful look. I think I have achieved pretty close to what I wanted her to look like. As when I started designing her I really had no idea what I wanted her to look like I'm happy with what I have now.

I will most likely go through and add more to her later in the term but for now it's nice :) .
I must now go and add the same detail to the walk and run animations too.

More updates later.

4 weeks left!!

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

so, with only 3-4 weeks to go I have moved into GETITALLDONE mode. Today I worked on Persephone's walk animation. I have to say I'm really quite happy with it :) . I will however keep going back and fixing up anything that I missed first time round BUT now I need to work on fixing my old run animation... oh joy... :P

Old run cycle

There is quite a bit to fix up as the run was my first attempt at drawing Persephone moving and since drawing it I have refined her character and design to be more dainty and florally.  

new walk cycle

I worked on adding more detail to the dress and hair. I also added eyes and flowers in her hair. I slimmed down her arms and feet to make her look dainty.

I changed her skin colour, before she had more of a pale look however my team mates and I felt she would look more Greek and goddess like with olive skin colour.




Tomorrow I plan on adding all the missing details from the old run cycle. She needs her face shaped and her feet made smoother and smaller. 

After I've finished putting all the details on her dress I will have to work out how well the run blends with the walk and weather I need a new transition animation or not. 

But that's for tomorrrow... 

just a quick update

Well I had a great not-very-tafie Easter weekend :).

*sigh*

back to work -___- .... :P nah it's not too bad, I quite enjoy my work but it was awesome having a break. Well today I worked on the walk animation for Persephone. It's coming along nicely but I do wish to get my team mates opinion on how it's going tomorrow. It's hard to get the walk to blend with the run but I'm working on it.

Well that's just a quick update for now, more tomorrow I guess.

Transition

Finishing up/starting the end transition for my waterfall scene. These transitions have proved challenging to blend rocks into flat land again.... that is one reason why I'm going back and adding more detail to the foreground of the other backgrounds, the more detail in the foreground the better it looks next too the waterfall.

I'm not 100% sure about the bridge where it joins with the land :/ but hmmm..... Never mind, I just fixed that then... I also finished the end transition. I'm quite happy with the way it looks, it blends well with it's transition :) . Alright, well time to move onto something else, probably animation..... :S yay.... :P

Fixie upie stuffs

today I'm working on fixing up the foreground of all my backgrounds. I'm just adding more detail to make it easier to blend with the transitions better.

The example I've put is just a rough sketch and I will be working more to improve the detail in the scene. More updates later.

      

Waterfaaaaall

Ooooook soo so far we have 5 different backgrounds made.

I just finished the waterfall themed backdrop. I have to say I'm pretty pleased with this one, it's animated and I worked pretty hard on it. I like the way it's scruffy and cartoony but still fits the nice style of our game.

When I first deemed the background finished I showed my team mates and they weren't so happy with the bridge. The bridge was very plain looking and straight. Peter commented saying he'd rather have more of a falling down bridge because in ancient Greece they wouldn't have clean cut wood. I worked on that and I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

< that is a picture of the original bridge. I really like the moss and rope edges on the new bridge.

I really like getting peoples opinion on my work to improve it to the best that I can.

Now that I've finished the waterfall I will be making the transition images that will layer over the sharp edge on the image and blend it into the next background.

Bricks and other jazz

 < Brick
Hades is placing bricks in Persephones path to try to stop her leaving the underworld.
these are the brinks. I designed them at the beginning of term 1.
Close up the blocks are not anything fancy, however in the game they will be much smaller and the colours and pictures show nicely.

We have matching button images on the bottom of the phone screen to match the blocks. These buttons are what you press to destroy each colour block to free up the path for Persephone.

Each block can only be destroyed by pressing the matching button. Each button activates a different god power. Such as, the blot is Zeus, the water is Poseidon, the rock is Artemis and the fire is Apollo.

Backgrounds

Alright, soooo backgrounds! yay fun fun fun :)

I explained in the previous post a little bit about how our game has parallax background and now in this post I'm going to be explaining how I design backgrounds, what style of art our game has and why and how the parallax backgrounds work.

Ok to start off I think I will explain my process for background making.

Deciding on a backdrop scene:
Josh and I meet up at TAFE and discuss what environments we want for our backgrounds and how we wish to display the landscape in the best way. We talk over what we like and don't like or what sort of things we especially want and so on. We then take the ideas to Jamie and Peter to get there opinions on what we have brainstormed.
Once we have decided on a background we all think will look good one of us will work on it at home and come back to show the team the work we have done, then we talk about what we like and don't like about it. That is our process for creating a background.

Style:
The style we went for in our backgrounds is a sort of hand painted. We really wanted a nice unique style for our game and as Josh and I are quite skilled artists we decided it would be good to have a hand drawn game. We thought about using vector art however we all agreed we wanted really unique art for our game.

Alllllright now moving onto how I actually create a background:
First I find pictures of what I'm drawing, such as caves.

Then I sketch out an outline for what I want in photoshop

Sketch

After I've sketch out something that I like I then start filling it in with colour. There is 4 layers to this background, the background caves, then the stalic tights, then the rocks down the bottom and finally on top is the pathway.

Background

Stalic tights

Rocks

Pathway

Each layer of the background will move at a different speed to make the foreground seem closer and the caves seem further back. 

I'll explain more about the backgrounds parallax and not parallax reasoning in another post. 

That's all for now.  

Group game update start sorta thing....

Sooooooooo this is the start of my blogging about 'Escape from Hades' our team TAFE assessment game.

This post is a little summery catch up thing as we have been working on this project for 6 weeks or so now.
I am the main artist working on backgrounds and animation. Josh is also working with me on backgrounds and he is designing the GUI as well.

Theme:
Our theme is about Greek gods. We're basing it on the short story of Persephone and Hades. Persephone the goddess of spring and Hades the god of the underworld.

Story:
There are many many many different versions of this story, so The Legion of Awesomeness (Jamies name for our team) talked about it and settled on our own retelling of the story.
Hades forced Persephone to become his wife and tricked her into eating food from the underworld cursing her to live there with him, however she can spend some time during the year above ground every year thus bringing spring to the world.
When Hades first kidnapped her, Persephone's mother Demeter was distraught and stopped performing her job of sewing seeds in the earth thus causing a famine. When Zeus decided Demeters famine was becoming a problem to the gods he helped rescue Persephone from Hades. Demeter promised to make crops grow during the time Persephone is with her above the ground and make nothing grow in the time Persephone is away, this then is winter.

The way we will be telling this story is to have Persephone running along with different background playing behind her. We have Spring backgrounds that will cycle round for a time then will transition into underworld themed backgrounds, showing Persephones time above ground and below ground.

Backgrounds:
We have 4 different backgrounds made so far. Two are parallax and the other two are flat images. We have an equal number of parallax to flat to make the transitions work. To really make our game appealing and interesting we wanted moving backgrounds that were not just flat images but more 3D, however the backgrounds are scrolling and this caused problems with the way the transitions lined up, such as the foreground moves faster than the backdrop so the foreground would change before the back and it got really messed up, so now we have flat backgrounds to transition over the top of the parallax backgrounds so the player will see a new background while the parallax one lines up again behind the see able backdrop.

Persephone:
I am working on a run animation for Persephone currently.
My interpretation for Persephone is a young, olive skinned, beautiful woman in flowing dress and flowers in her hair and on her dress. I did a lot of research on Persephone before I started designing her, as I really wanted to capture the feel of the spring goddess.

Hades:
I haven't worked on Hades design yet, however I really like the look of the Disney Hades from the movie Hercules. I'm going to research more into Hades and his roll as a god then work on his design.

I think I have covered everything, so enough boring talk for now, I will continue to update with what I've been working on and why blah blah and such :)