Case 5

For case number five Asbjørn has been doing some more animation. This time his task was to create the boss animations. When he got the boss concept design from Yngvar he immediately started to vectorize the drawings.

After redrawing the boss he went for frame-by-frame animation technique combined with some tweening. This is the same method as the animation technique for the albino-frog. As a reference for a four legged animal-walk he used “Animators Survival Kit”. In the last chapter of the book there is a chart for a dog walk cycle. It contains various poses such as contact, passing, high and low poses. After using this guide he ended up with this animation:


















This was not exactly what we wanted for the game. The walk cycle is very standard and “friendly”. The walk cycle doesn’t fit the character profile. This is supposed to be a creepy and scary boss, so Asbjørn were to apply these characteristics to the animation. After some more hours he ended up with this new animation, which is more suited for the personality we want to give the boss.


















When we were satisfied with the walk cycle he also created an idle animation, scream animation and a start-walk animation. These animations will also be used in the game at the boss stage. Here is a sprite of the animations made, as well as our charming Dr. Bones.















Now that our character can use vines to swing from platform to platform, he needed a swinging animation. Yngvar made this animation during case 5. The vine-swinging action is a little bit complicated, so it has required a bit more cooperation between the artist and the programmer than other character animations we’ve done. The animation in itself is a little bit cruder than some of the previous character animations. The reason for this is due to how the vines function. Gameplay-wise they work great, but (at our current skill level) it’s difficult to calculate exactly how the character will behave while swinging on the vines, and make animations that will fit in perfectly with this without spending an unreasonable amount of time getting it right. Some tweaks may be done to the animation towards the end of the project if our schedule allows for it.
 In addition to making this character animation, we’ve also made some updates to graphic elements involving the in-game menus and the cursor. The sound settings menu has now got a visual appearance that fits in with the rest of the menus in the game. The cursor has also received a visual update, and the in-game menu has been expanded with more options.

The in-game settings menu

The cursor

The system we currently have in place to show the character’s “sanity” required some drawings of the character’s expressions in different mental states. The following four images were made for this use (we may remove, replace or add more expressions were we find it appropriate).

This last week, Gisle has mainly been focused on finishing, and tying together different parts of the script. Things like the ropes, puzzles and sound has been polished. 

He has also built early versions of all the levels, and put in events where they belong. He scripted two action sequences, one were you have to escape from rising lava, and one where you have to escape from the last boss. The last bossfight turned out quite awesome and got the adrenaline pumping, at least for us. We also made a new puzzle that will be used in connection to the boss, this puzzle turned out quite difficult, so we decided to add some sort of hint for the player to find.

Hong still working with backgrounds for chapter two and chapter tree, were she paint mountain and ice. She also draw the shelf that the main character will stand on in the last chapter before the boss is coming. this was drawn in Flash and have almost the same draw style like tiles, this was because it look more natural in front in the game. Since we only need one in the game we disided to use the painting number on the left. 

Sondre has been focusing a bit more on soundeffect and atmosphere sounds than music this week. The cronology of the levels has been slightly changed, which meant we needed new sound and songs. The ¨escape from lava¨ section also needed some sounds to fasten the pace. Two of the atmospheresoundtrack are now finished, you can listen to them if you press these links:

Jungleatmosphere & songCaveatmosphere & songThe atmosphere soundtracks will most likely not be this loud in the actual game, but these videos is only to demonstrate how it will work. You can also notice that the this cavesong is different from the previous one i posted, since we had decided to melt together the ice and the cavelevel.