GIF Updates!

I've spent most of this weekend researching how to make effective sprite animations.

I have always been fond of the traditional hand drawn animation techniques and I really hope i can give my sprite animations a more naturalistic movement.

So far things are looking pretty good!

It definitely feels very fulfilling to be able to continue working in a gestural manner digitally and making my character come to life.

This Friday is the last class day for Summer courses and I'm hoping to present Astra Fay's Walk-cycle, Run-cycle and jump via GIF format.

In terms of the game animations, I would need to make a character sheet with all the keyframed poses in the animations and hand that down to Justin who would actually just grab the individual images and insert them into the game and doesn't need full working animated files. (Apprantly this would be more difficult for the programers to deal with at least in terms of the 2D Side Scroller Game we have in mind).

Unfortunately I am still running into problems uploading my GIF files here.
But I WILL figure this out!

Animated GIF Update

I went back and finished the walk cycle, but now I'm testing out how it plays on here.

I changed some save settings and I hope that did the trick.

YAY!!!! It worked!!!
So exciting! Now off to work on my character animations! 

Animated GIF test run

Just testing out an animated gif I made of a walk cycle I plan to use for Astra Fay.

I want for him to walk around proudly and happy bobbing his head from side to side.

I especially feel like he can pull this off since his personality is vastly different from the other characters! 

Here is the first gif i made that has a 2 second delay for each frame.

And here is another one of the same only with a 1 second delay on each frame.

So it appears to me that something isn't really working right.

Maybe I saved the image sequence wrong since they are just being layered over each other and not necessarily appearing and disappearing in a sequential manner.

Although, when I open the original file saved to my desktop in a browser, it plays perfectly fine.  Hmm...

Guess I'll have to go do some research now to solve this issue.

Working on a website!

I'm so excited to begin working on my own website!
I think it's about time I got one of my own and luckily my boyfriend is a programmer!

He is actually not familiar with the code to make a website himself, but is quite interested to learn for future reference. After talking this over, he brought up 'Bootstrap' which is apparently what social websites like Twitter use.
I think we are going to try and use that, but in the meantime, I will continue working on my sprite animations, concept and re-sizing my art work/designing my webpage.

Beginning Sprite Animation

So I got in a huge discussion this weekend with my boyfriend over some logistics/details of our game.  I was very curious to see how my art would translate to a playable game.

Ultimately I have decided to go with a more clean vector based style for the over look of our game instead of the 16-bit pixel sprite art.

Because I am more comfortable working in a gestural manner, I figured this would be better.

Hopefully by the end of this concept art course I'm taking in school, I will have animations completed for all 4 characters in our game.
I was thinking of making an Idle, a walk, a run and a jump animation for each character, but I'm not sure I will be able to complete that for all of them given the time constraint, but I do intend to continue working on the animations even after the class is over as well as including attack and defense animations for each character.
After much discussion, we decided to animate the characters in a "nude" sense much like the concept art that I made shows.  Basically, no armor, no weapons, etc. because we would like to later layer those items over the basic "nude" animations and have them properly aligned.  The reason for having this approach to the character animations is because we would like to display the items/armor a player picks up in game and have them visible to the player (instead of designing them a certain way where you do not get to see those nice little changes and just having it implied, but not shown).
For practice and simplicity, I will begin the animation process with Astra Fay as he is the simplest of the characters and I have a few distinct animations in mind for him.
I plan to have less frames in his animation to give the illusion of speed to his character.  

Mr. Biggums on the other hand, will have more frames to really show the slowness of his stalky nature.
Also, we decided to keep our game as a 2D side-scroller instead of the "top-down" isometric view we had originally intended.
We want to make this available for up to 4 players, but in order to do so, we also decided to have a 4-way split screen in which each character can go anywhere within a given map, but will eventually all have to come together to protect the item/people in a central point. 

(After all this is a tower defense game).

Doing a 4 way split screen gives each player the opportunity to explore the area map and not be overwhelmed by the fixed camera that typically stays on a certain area on a screen where all characters are seen at the same time.  We want to also make it so that doors and windows to other sections of the map can be explored, and someone can open a door and be fighting aliens in a different room, but they can be seen through the windows of another players screen if they are standing around the windows of the previous room outside of the one where the player just came from.  We think this will add a nice effect and depth to the play area in the game while still keeping it 2D.