Week 10 - Animations

This week I layed out the foundations for how I will approach making the 2D animations. I anticipate each animation to be quite a large task so I intend to start by making skeletal versions of each. This will help me transfer my drawn out key frames into digital images and help me determine how the pacing should flow. The next stage will be to fully line out each frame and finally to colour and shade each frame. I will take a 2-frame alternation approach to these animations i.e. each frame will have a slight variation so it will alternate between images. This will give each scene a bit more movement compared to using a flat image. It is also what Bernado used in his original game trailer and it suited the game style really well to give that more tense, action feel. I will start the animations later this week so that I can get full colour profiles for each 3D model. This will allow me to create a better consistency between the 2D animations and the gameplay.

We also discussed using the church scene again for displaying character profiles. controls, settings etc. so I will factor this into my work schedule after the animations are complete.

For the rest of the week I made the collectables UI for items and money picked up after each battle, e.g. the items each character picks up, new clothing, new weapons, money they may loot etc. We also decided that we would incorporate the characters reacting to these collectables into the animations. As we can't make a full demo we can't demonstrate the impact that these pickups will have so well e.g. the player can't go back to the town area to spend money, customise their clothing etc. so adding this into the animations will depict that as best we can with our limitations. I also made icons for each weapon in battle so the player can see which character owns which weapons (they all have different stats so this must be clear).

I also made more UI to bridge the gap between cutscenes and gameplay so we could have dialogue and character 'slide-ins' i.e. overlay enlarged character designs to make some situations clearer. However we discussed this and decided that dialogue would be an element that is not key and would take up more time so this idea has been scrapped for now. It was still good to design and make the UI and it has potential to be used for other purposes later.