I spent week three of April animating. Animation is notorious for being labor intensive and I find the reputation is well deserved. Sometimes it’s a lot of fun and sometimes a task surprises me by being simpler than it looks. However, more often, it is a busy process where I try to come up with as many tricks as possible to avoid duplicating work. I end up having to create animations within animations to save time and this can be a bit involved. All my animations are done in Adobe Flash.
I completed five animation sequences this week:
1. Arborian south-east run shadow
Something that quickly became apparent once I put my old Arborian sprite on the tilemap in the game was how conspicuous it’s lack of shadow was 😄. So I worked on adding a shadow. I also smoothed out the animation and made sure the height of the Arborian matches it’s leap – with the apex of the leap’s height corresponding with the most outstretched posture. I have not yet tested the shadow on the map, but I’m hoping the alpha channel (transparency) will properly shade the ground that falls under the shadow.
The Arborian sprite has eight animation sequences, one for each main movement direction: North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, and Northwest. Three of those directions are mirror copies of each other, so that means I only have to animate five directions of travel. This is better than eight, but still a lot, so I did not have enough time to add the shadow to all directions. I may hold off on that, since I am going to be focusing on gameplay development before graphical polish.
2. Arborian sitting down
This one was fairly simple, but I worked-in a lot of extra details to the Arborian. You’ll notice in the running animation below that the Arborian’s body is not as well defined and even lacks a neck! I have worked out a lot more of the Arborians’ physique since I first animated them, so newer animation sequences have more detail. I will eventually redo the animation for the running sprites, but I’ll save that for later.
3. Arborian moving its tail
This one is just cute. I’m basing the Arborians’ physical characteristics on multiple animals, but there’s a lot of feline influence here. I’ve had cats all my life, so I have a better sense of their shape and motion than most other animals. Here you see the cat-like mannerisms come to the fore.
4. Arborian shifting in place
In order to make the Arborians look like living animals, I want to make sure that they are not completely idle for very long. I made this small shift in place so I can have a little motion while the troop is sitting idle.
This animation will not play in a loop like the gif above – it doesn’t look very natural. Instead, I’ll randomize the sprite animations so that the sprite will make different motions while idle.
5. Arborian grooving to a beat
On a less frequent basis, I’ll throw in this animation to show the more playful nature of the Arborians:
That’s April week three. Thanks for reading, Jam on! 🎶🎵🎶
Arborlands 