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oozey mess
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Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Love Begins
Product Placement
titsay
The Bowery Presents
Noah Kahan
One Nice Bug Per Day
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
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Origami Around
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Today's Document
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@cassiesartblog
this is the format that I would give Lloyd for the sprites. They have to be the images spaced out and aligned as PNGs, so Lloyd could extract them and place them in game as sprites. there was a few issues with this however as Lloyd had only ever used 2 frame sprites before, so these were a lot more complex for him to work with, which is why in game they look a bit off and wrongly paced.
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some screen shots of conversations with Lloyd that shows what it was like working together
Evaluation
For my FMP I wanted to try something different, at first I was worried about not having a final film idea after thinking about it over the summer, so when the opportunity for collaboration came up I took interest. We had a big gathering in the cinema room for people from Animation, Games and Music, to all share our ideas for projects that needed help from people on other courses. I saw one person (Lloyd) was in the process of making a 2D platformer game and needed an animator and artists for the visual development side, and I thought it would be a perfect opportunity to do a collaboration project for my FMP.
Looking back, I wish I hadn’t done this – I had not the first idea of how 2D games are made, and quickly realised that my collaborator knew nothing about animation either.
Having done some research, this project was never really going to go smoothly. In a real game development, the game mechanics, layouts and all of the things Lloyd was responsible for would have been done way before any of the visual elements. Obviously things like concept art were all completed previously but actual assets for the real game are only developed after all the mechanics of the game are completed, in order for the animators and asset artists to have a sort of ‘stage’ to work with. What I was doing was trying to animate blind, and create backgrounds for a stage I didn’t even know the size of, and a character I didn’t know the mechanics for. I ended up making animations and backgrounds for assets that didn’t fit, because Lloyd and I were working at the same time, making changes and not really knowing how the other one was working. Even when we would meet and look at each other’s work and programmes, there was still a lack of understanding of each other’s process. I would ask questions like, ‘how fast is the jump?’ and ‘how many frames does the run need to be?’ and he wouldn’t be able to tell me the answers because he wouldn’t have had programmed the game yet, or his sprite example wouldn’t even work so there was no point testing it. It was doomed to struggle at the start, and because I didn’t recognise this, I was too far down the line by the time I realised this wasn’t going to turn out like I’d hoped. I also didn’t realise how difficult it is for games programmers to make sequences for things like ‘anticipation’. For example when I animated a jump, there is a moment that the character bends her knees and goes down into a squash to prepare for the jump. Games programmers don’t tend to bother with this because in game when someone playing a game wants to jump, and hit the jump button, they want it straight away – they don’t want that initial jump animation before the character jumps. So, things like that, which are essential for good animation, didn’t fit in the game programming – we had a big problem with things like this because the way I was animating just wasn’t working in the game because Lloyd didn’t know how to programme In those extra pieces of animation that make it flow nicely. Only very recent games, for example ‘Ori and the Blind Forest’ have those ‘in between’ animations. When looking at more basic games, which tend to be a bit older, for example ‘Sonic’ or ‘Super Mario’ their sprite animations are very limited. So, inreality, there was never going to be very much for me to animate, and because there was such a struggle in the process, I didn’t end up with very much to show for my time.
Other problems we ran into was communication issues. There was a couple of times where we would plan to meet up and Lloyd would cancel or not reply to me on the day. Obviously this put me behind- some days I would need feedback in order to continue my work, and if we didn’t meet up I would get stuck and frustrated. Also there was the bad communications purely through not knowing each others methods of doing our work. Sometimes Lloyd wouldn’t understand that I needed to know certain things like frame rates. There was also times when I didn’t understand why the animations weren’t working in game. There was an issue that I had given the sprite sheets to Lloyd to put in game, made perfectly, but then when Lloyd put them in game he didn’t understand the timing of the animations. He would take out frames, or not align each frame correctly, so that the animation would go from looking good in video form, but bad in game form. This was a huge barrier, and you can even see in the final render of the game there is still some issues with quality and congruency of the animation. This is a mistake on both our parts as neither of us really knew how putting custom sprites into a game worked, and even with lots of trial and error there was no satisfactory ending.
Over all this “learning curve” has been a good experience, - I know how to make 2D sprites for games, so I have learned that process. I have also learned I really enjoy figurative animation. I also learned that collaboration is a difficult but rewarding process; you can learn a lot from another person in the creative industries, and it never hurts to learn a part of someone else’s craft in order to gain a broader understanding of the industry and how far it reaches. Hopefully I can use the things I have learned going forward into my career, and although I am not entirely happy with the final outcome, it is a springboard into bigger and better projects I am going to be a part of in the future.
Final Thoughts
I have had a very interesting FMP experience, and to be honest I am disappointed with the result. I am going to link another longer post about why that is later on. I really should’ve done a film or a couple of shorts, because I know this body of work doesn’t really show my skills that well or my creativity. I hope I will continue animating while at my new job which I start on Monday at ClothCat Animation, as I would love to make a personal animated project in my spare time, as I feel like I still don’t have very much I am truly proud of from my time at university.
I am just putting all of the aspects of my work together – I have made a title card and some place names for my show reel, and also put my animation into a screenshot of the gameplay Lloyd sent me, as advised by Nikki.
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The Title screen for the game development.
so I got the Gameplay back from Lloyd and it really doesn't look as good as I was hoping. Graham and Nikki have suggested some ways of making it look better but i’m pretty disappointed! will just have to focus on making the show reel look nice and put more focus on my animation than the game itself.
I comp’d all of the assets together to make the final ‘gameplay’ scene. Lets hope the final gameplay looks as good.
Old enemy on the left, new on the right
I finished the scene and am comping up a scene like asked me to, Im using my backgrounds and animated assets I made to create a ‘concept gameplay’ scene. Nikki didn’t like the first robot animation I made however, so I am going to design another one
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Week 15
Lloyd has handed in his game and I haven’t seen what It looked like, but I have asked for him to send me all of the work he has done in sort of video formats, I need video of game play and his process to hand in for my show reel, so hopefully it is not terrible. I’m working on the first of the two scenes and have nearly finished.
week 15
Lloyd has handed in his game and I haven’t seen what It looked like, but I have asked for him to send me all of the work he has done in sort of video formats, I need video of gameplay and his process to hand in for my show reel, so hopefully it is not terrible. I’m working on the first of the two scenes and have nearly finished.
week 14
I have decided to do some more animations. This week I have coloured and finished all of the animations I had planned on doing, so I want to do a couple more. I will do an animation where BB hides from the enemy sprite, which means I get to use the enemy character, and another enemy character. I hope that I will have enough time to complete these.
more backgrounds
Week 12
I have finished what I want to have as the backgrounds, but I’m going to leave it to Lloyds discretion to put them into the game and get back to me with some feedback. I also did a quick enemy animation with the bone tool in animate but I don’t know if that will be used as haven’t really had much time to do it.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
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Week 11
I’m doing some backgrounds this week as Lloyd just told me his deadline is the 27th April, not the 11th of May, so I have less time than I thought to make all the assets. I’ve decided to make sort of tiles for the backgrounds, and to make them far simpler than I initially imagined, because otherwise they won’t tile nicely if they’re too detailed and will look out of place and irregular. They are basic but I’ve decided not to out as much emphasis on the environment design after the disastrous layout argument I have had with Lloyd.
Week 10
Lloyd re did the jump animation and it looks much better. I am now working on the wall hang and wall jump. I am realising as we go along that the animations for games have to be far simpler that I would like to animate, so I am just going to do what I want animation wise, and then we can tweak it so that it also works in game. I don’t want to end up with really basic animation for my show reel, so I’d prefer to just cut them down to fit in game.