The Final Project

After implementing the features of the game, and going through it’s many revisions throughout the process, the game was finally displayed to other people.

One such why of how it was displayed included a video presentation which showcased the overview of the game during its earlier state.

The video talks about the story of the game, as well as each team member’s role during the development.

Below is a link to the final game project to play it:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/hhla4trkxiz9dw9/Unusual_Dai.zip?dl=0

 

The Animation Work

Being the sprite animator of the group I had to come up with varies animated movements depending upon what our team came up with on what our protagonist can do throughout the game. Creating the overall aesthetics of the game was a challenge that took a lot of revisions as well as some animations that had to be cut during the final development of the game.

Run Cycle Version 1

Run Cycle Version 2

Version 1 of the running animation were an example of a movement implementation that had to be reworked. Version 1 had most of the running movement down, however, the lack of the legs bending during the run was ruining the display of showing true natural running motion. Creating version 2 helped address this.

There were other concepts that were developed but were later changed throughout the development of the game. One of them were the protagonist’s ability to form a shield that can also function as a projectile to hit enemies.

Shield/Projectile Animation

The concept of the shield came from our teams idea to have the protagonist be a protector for civilians from the enemies. It’s original purpose were to have the shield protect the protagonist as projectiles were targeted at her as well as other civilians. This idea was later reduced to having the shield move function as a projectile to take out the enemies.

Finally, there were concepts that were planned to be used in the game but were later never implemented due to the lack of finding any application that can use for that animation in the game. The back flip animation were a few of the animations that did not make the final cut of the game.

Back Flip Animation

The back flip movement was a great concept to work with for me and the team during the earlier development of the game. However, later during development after the overall mechanics of the game were slowly being put in place, our team later found out that putting the back flip movement would make the mechanics of the game unnecessarily more strict. For instance, it would lead to fixed character back movement trajectory while in the air as well as create big background stage revisions just to accommodate this movement rather than the simple air movement of the character that were already put in place. Because of this, the back flip movement was not implemented into the game.

The Milestones for our Capstone Project: The Protagonist

In our Capstone project our team had to come up with a main character that will be used throughout our two semesters of game development. Our first main character consisted of originally being an older male that had athletic ability. But after some discussion we decided that the main character will be female.

Image above was created using Adobe Illustrator CC using a mix of “pen” and “color fill” tools. After fleshing out what our female character will look like in-game, next we had to come up for what would be the “art-style” of the game, such as whether the main character should be either with borderlines or without borderlines as illustrated above. Border function was possible due to creating the entire sprite using the pen tool which creates borders for both the outline and shape fill for the design. We decided to go with the borderlined design due to the character sprites I had to design were going to be small, and to compensate for smaller visibility we went with borderlines around the character.

Laying The Foundation

For our capstone project our development started by creating sketches for what our game would be like. Our Programmer (also producer of the project) created a programming skeleton for the game, which is the overall mechanics of the game. Our designer came up with sketches of background stages in the game. Our music producer was coming up with some samples for us to hear. Our concept artist was coming up with what our protagonist should look like. For me, since my role of the team was the “Sprite Artist,” I had to come up with animated board sketches to how our main character should move around the world.

        

Illustrated above are a few of the movement sketches that I came up with to help illustrate how the character should move in the world, such as running, jumping, and climbing within the stage.

Individual Work

Back in 2011, during the earlier learning of gaming development I have designed individual game projects of my own. The goal of the project was to program, design, and produce sounds and music of your own without using outside sources. Here is a screenshot example of earlier work I have created. In the game you control a spaceship that must make it to the end of the level while trying to get pass all of the obstacles and enemies that block your path. You control the spaceship with the arrows, while the space-key is used to shoot. I have even implemented the ability for players to hold down the space-bar to charge for a more powerful shot.

Regardless of designing all of the aspects of creating games, my real focus in a job is a graphics designer.