Week 11- Development
Alrighty! We are on the home stretch of this semester!
As per the previous post, you can see the kind of game the team I am with are going for. The type of feel we are going for is 'Optomistic CyberPunk'. Thankfully, the people I was teamed up with let me mainly do the art, and while I was not able to get to the background, the walking cycle of my character turned out pretty well.
This was the initial character design that was heavily inspired by the artwork in the one page document made by Jinwha Jang, a Seoul based artist who specializes in illustration. I found that her works tend to fall into the optimistic cyberpunk category really well, as was instantly inspired by it. Here are the initial sketches for the character.
I also designed a poster idea for it, but was not able to complete it due to time restraints and the fact it no longer fit with the theme.
As optimistic as this drawing was going to be, I had no idea on how to translate it to 8-bit pixel art style, so as a result, the pixel art character ended up looking completely different from the concept art.
Our character was to be drawn in all black and white besides a singular colour. We decided that the silhouette was going to be simple as we did not feel that the design needed alot. While this character took some inspiration from the concept art, it was still a vastly different from the initial design, as well as that despite the fact that the initial character design met the criteria (kinda), I felt like something was off and decided to restart.
I did not save the initial drawing of the final character, but I do have the GIFS of the running animation.
As you can see, there is a coloured version, as well as a black and white version. This fits with our initial lore of the game, where the character slowly regains their ability to see colour again. I felt like this design stayed truer to the original concept, and was unique but familiar enough that it appeals to all audiences.
In terms of how the final product turned out, it still looks a bit choppy. When I was animating it, I did not have a sketched walking cycle to follow, so all I was doing was copying the previous frames, then erasing and redrawing one limb at a time. While this kind of worked, you can tell the first and final frame of the animation do not line up enough, which is why you can see a slight jump in the fact the character looks like it has a limp. This is all good for experience though, and this was my first attempt at animating a walking cycle!
Unfortunately, due to time restraints and life, I was unable to create a background for the game. I wanted to do a background that had 3 different layers, and when added to the game, it would create a depth of field called the parallax effect. Which is the effect you see when driving in a city, when buildings far away move slower than the ones closer to you
