This is the sprite sheet I’ve created for our game this week. Since we use a top down perspective in the game I have been looking at reference images from games with similar view. I’ve mostly looked at the animation from GTA 2 because I have always been fond of the overall graphics of that game. I also needed to see their solution to the top down movement animations. My work went slowly at first, because I have only made sprites in pixelart before, so I did not really know which dimensions to use now and how high resolution I could use for the images. Luckily Simon in the group is a bit of a photoshop genius, so he helped me to figure it out. He also showed me the function in photoshop that allows you to animate directly from the layers. I warmly recommend this to anyone making sprite sheets for the first time, or any time for that matter! It saves a massive amount of time you would have to spend bouncing it back and forth to the programmer.
I was not sure at first which colors to use for the impression or mood of the character, finally I decided to go for a green cardigan to communicate the grumpy old man impression along with khaki pants and the white hair. In doing so I chose that over giving him aggressive colors to convey his aggressive mood, I think it would be better to enhance that through sound and behavior.
The thing about making animations and graphics for a bird perspective is that you have to be ridiculously obvious in your design. Especially when making a space shooter with very little room for tutorials and narrative. So I think that is the biggest challenge with these animations, is to sacrifice detail and “artistic joy” for clarity. However it is still fun to animate the sprites!
I feel really good after this week’s sprint review, I have accomplished all the artefacts I set out to do. I’m starting to figure out how to be productive without being stressed out, which I think is vital for me to survive in the industry later on. It could be partly thanks to the structure that SKRUM provides for the work process that I’m less stressed about the project.
Nils Wennergren 