This page contains extra documentation and also work that might not have made it to the PDF submission. I couldn’t find appropriate places to put these in the submission, but I still worked hard on them so they will be presented here.
To help our team’s environment artist, I made some colour iterations. In the end, none of these were used in the final project, but thumbnails ‘b’ and ‘c’ did contribute to the establishment of cool red tones as our main background colour.
Here is a low-framerate gif of my cleaned up frames. The work was quite straightforward since the keyframes were already laid out for me. However, the only real obstacle was making the drawings look like the original character model. There are a few inconsistencies in the character proportions, but the game developers urgently needed the animated frames for the run cycle so I couldn’t polish this further.
This is the short demonstration animation I made to aid my groupmate in her keyframing. She was struggling quite a bit and worrying too much about the little details, so I reminded her of the basics and our animation turned out alright in the end! She told me that this really helped her figure our the motion she wanted to achieve, which made me happy to hear.
I didn’t have space to talk about this in the PDF but I made some minor fire FVX that are a minor part the game. This was my first time working on VFX and I actually found it quit difficult at first. I ended up watching some YouTube tutorials, as well as observing fire animation in slow motion to help me figure out what I needed to do in order to make a convincing fireball animation. I even made some colour iterations, which was a bit tedious since the program I used wouldn’t just let me use hue sliders. I had to manually adjust the colours on each layer. This wasn’t such a bad thing because in the end, I got to have a lot of control over the hue variations in each iteration.
Overall, I think there are some frames that look a bit choppy and awkward, but I’m still proud of myself because I was able to make usable VFX for the game.
This is a quick little animation I made for looping. We weren’t able to finish this in time so it wasn’t included in the game. Adding this falling animation was one of our stretch goals that we couldn’t achieve. I just couldn’t seem to get this to look quite right, nor could I get the particle effects around the character to not look strange.
I made some animations for the HP bar. I didn’t include this in my pdf since I couldn’t demonstrate the animations there. I decided to add more cracks the lower the player’s health gets. From our group research, games always add little details like this to add some hints of flavour that can feel more immersive. Since the character doesn’t look any different when they take damage, I thought it should be reflected in the HP bar instead.
In summary, this project was a great opportunity for me to work in a game development team and also experiment in artistic areas which I never would have tried otherwise. I realised that art fundamentals can easily be translated to many art forms, which highlight how important it is to practice them. This project also taught me how to support my team and work in a group rather than by myself. Working with a group felt really nice since the work load is evenly distributed. We worked very well together and got a lot of work done in just under three months.
I’m very proud of my group and what we achieved. I am eager to apply my newly developed soft skills and tackle my individual work from a new perspective.