Hello! Not much happened this week when it comes to graphics. Alot of time were spent on very small arifacts, writing in our design dokument or managing our backlog. Most of the in-game graphics were done but there was one last piece that we implemented this week: The story.

So this week we’ll take a look at the story-pictures that I drew for the intro of the game, wich sets up the event that you, the player, will take part in. I kind of went through how I thought with the aesthetic style of the story-pictures last week, but to sum it up quickly: I’m going for kind of a storybook aesthetic with a scale of brown and beige. Here I’ll go through what I thought with each of these pictures, what I like with them and also all the stupid mistakes I did with them…

Well, to begin with I should show you the first steps of their creation.

These are the first storyboards that I drew. Small and simple, and while my finished pictures are less messy and sketchy, these basics are still intact for most of them.

Ehm…

So here I wanted an establishing shot of the owl, the train and the enviroment around them. There are some sloppy mistakes though, like a missing window on the train, but overall this is one of my favorites.

This is the first point you get shown the owlets, whose rescue is the main objective with the game. Since the level-designer was still working on the level we didn’t know exactly how many owlets you’d be able to pick up during the game so the number changes a little between pictures… I also think this is the worst looking drawing of the owl in all of the pictures. Somethings just a little… Off…

Smoke coming out of the chimney, the first sign that something is wrong for our little owl. The biggest mistake I made in this picture is a little more subtle this time. Apparently the sun decided to move to the other side of the earth and shine a little on that side instead.

This is probably my favorite of all the pictures, the perspective and dynamics of the scene was pretty challenging to pull off, and the dust pushing out from the front of the train with smoke bulging from the locomotives chimney makes it clear that things are moving. Ofcourse there are some mistakes here too. One owlet is gone from the last picture and also that other thingimajig that should be on the engine of the locomotive.

A reverse shot to show the shocked face of the owl mother and her children being scattered out a bit. Also liked the perspective of this one and it’s probaby the one picture with the least amount of continuity-mistakes of the whole bunch.

I’m being pretty negative here. I do not dislike these pictures, actually I’m pretty happy with them overall. I’m not very good at drawing different perspectives and enviroments, wich this task really challenged me with. The mistakes that I did had really nothing to do with that. They’re just sloppy blunders that I noticed too late.

I do hope that these things will not turn people off this little vignette as I put both time and effort into it and also had a really good time making it.

This week has been a week of ELECTRICAL ANIMATION!

I have two artefacts to show this time, both sharing the theme of a high voltage-count. For now I’ll start with the thundercloud wich has been the meatiest of all of the animation I’ve worked on so far.

The thundercloud is one of our hazards in the game. It’s a sinister cloud that moves across the top of the screen and shoots down a bolt of lightning at regular intervals that the player has to look out for.

So this is the first animation I created. It’s alright, it’s functional, but I felt that there was something missing. A lack of force. A bolt of lightning is not just any old zap from a faulty power outlet. It’s a zigzaging beam of focused electrical energy that strikes down onto the earth from the heavens!

Simple to say, I wasn’t entirely satisfied with it.

So I thought about how I could give it that extra ”Omph!” that it needed, and I realised that the fault didn’t lie in the lightning itself, but in the cloud floating above.

There’s a basic rule in animation, that if you want to make a good looking, fluid and weighty motion you should use ”squash and stretch”. While animating the cloud I made use of squashing, as I not only pushed the cloud up a little, but also added particles wich torn off and pushed away from the cloud simulating a invisible force.                                           The trickiest part of this was to make the cloud fluidly return to its original state so the animation could loop. By cross-referencing the frames before and after each frame I drew  worked out in the end, although it’s a bit unrealistic how the cloud kind of bounces a bit like jelly.

The animation is made out of 16 frames, played up at a speed of 0,06 seconds between frames, with the sprite being about 160 pixels of height and 560 pixels of width.

There may still be some rough edges that I could smooth out, but overall I am quite satisfied with how it turned out. I feel like I got the power that I was looking for.

So this is the other electricity-themed artefact I worked on this week. It’s quite simple. A powerline that has to give away some kind of effect so that the player will know A. That it’s a powerline and B. That they probably shouldn’t cuddle with it. It’s exaggerated, pointy, fast and erratic as to look threatening to the player. It’s made out of 5 frames that are played at a speed of 0,05 seconds per frame.

It’s too bad that it got scrapped.                                                                                                            The way this hazard worked was very similiar to how another functioned, so we at the team found it unnecessary and redundant. Even though we probably should have reached this conclusion earlier I’m not heartbroken about it, that’s just what happens sometimes. And I still got experience doing it.

So this has been my week of high-voltage animation. Have a good day/evening, dear reader!

This is an animation for our game Trowl, a game that is about an owlmother who has built a nest on a train that one day starts rushing. With all of her children scattered around the train, she quickly has to start trying to find them. On the way, everything from predatory birds to dangers in her environment will try to make life harder for her.

Two of the obstacles she’ll have to face are thunderclouds on the top of the screen and electricity lines that hang above the train on the lower end of the screen. These will, upon contact, electrocute the poor owl and this is the animation that’ll play out whenever that happens.

Obviously I took alot of inspiration from cartoons when making this. Electrocution is a very horrible thing to bear witness to in real life but cartoons has always been good in making it a bit comical. While our game is alot about stress and pressure on the player in finding the owlets before the time runs out, we don’t want it to be a cruel or graphic game. I suppose I could have gone the whole route of making the sprite blink with it’s little owl-skeleton showing through, but I didn’t want it to be TOO goofy either. This is a good middleground I think.

The animation is pretty simple, there are three frames of animation that are going back and forth to create a fast and hard effect, drawing the body in a way wich makes it all distorted and pointy. I did hold back a bit the first time I tried it, but it just didn’t become fluid enough and looked really stale. I think I underestimated that even though the animation is supposed to be choppy in a certain way, the frames still has to go into one another to make it look good. So, I made it more excessive and tried to focus on leaving no area non-animated, creating movement on the whole sprite.

In the same category of work, I’ll call it ”damaged sprite”-work, I also created a death-animation. Also pretty simple, using four different sprites and spreading them out during 22 frames of animation. And It’s one that I’ll probably touch up a bit later, but the whole slow to fast falling-animation is one that’s essential to give the character some weight, usually used in fighting-games where the game slows down at the knockout and then speeds up as the body hits the floor. As with the electrocution-animation I didn’t want to make the death-animation overly cruel or graphic, more something that will make the player feel defeated. It’s harder to see in motion, but the last sprite in the animation looks so sad and beaten, and that’s the more or less the point of it.