I know I said, no big updates, but oh well... Gotta keep you all informed!
I still have a bunch to do to get the game to where it needs to be and every day presents its own new and unique challenges, but I’m making headway! Recently, I needed to create some animated fire for the game. I have been doing animation for a while and even studied it in college for a bit, but this was proving difficult. I had never done effects animation and the results were somewhat lacking:
My First Attempt
I thought it looked neat and kinda like fire, but also just kinda…bouncy? And very symmetrical. Overall it just wasn't working for me. So I went and studied a bunch of things for reference and tried again:
2nd Attempt
This one felt better. Still bouncy but it felt like it was “puffing” properly - I also kept the sparks turning into bats thing because I thought that looked neat. Still though, not really fire.
At this point I was getting really frustrated. I would draw for a while, do some more research, draw some more, do more research. I was sinking a LOT of time into this fire thing. Then it occurred to me that what was difficult was getting the motion right. I have done all of the animating for the game in Photoshop - and that’s fine, it works, but the timeline doesn't have onion skinning and it can actually be kind of a pain in the ass sometimes.
For instance, every time you add a layer - to create a frame - it adds that layer to EVERY frame. It’s not the end of the world, but it is a hassle. It also doesn't have natural onionskinning so that you can see what the last from was while you’re doing the next frame. Onionskinning makes nailing the motion of an animation SO much easier. So I thought about it and realized I was being dumb.
The game is being made IN FLASH. I opened up flash, created a new .fla, and started animating the fire by hand in flash - using ONIONSKINNING - and then brought it back into Photoshop so that I could do the pixeling. And here we go:
FIIIIIIIRE!!!
Now it still needs some work, but this to me looks right; this is fire. Hopefully when I’m done with it, it will be exactly what I need, but at the very least it looks good.Anyway, I’ve only got about 12 days left until the demo’s fallback date, so I’d better get back to work. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoyed this look at my animating process!
Nice to see work in progress.