Week 10

This week I worked on more visuals and implementation

Animation Implementation

I first worked on the second enemy’s animations as E-Jay had fixed the previous issue of the enemy’s rotation that would effect the direction the entire sprite was facing. I implemented the spawn and death animations and tweaked the existing animations to be correctly timed with the enemy’s attacks. There was an issue where the enemy’s animations would not face the correct direction which E-Jay and I worked on to resolve, E-Jay fixed the coding issues and I fixed the issues in the animator so that the timing of the animations correct.

Tiles

Water Tiles

I also worked on the sprites for the boss room. I had discussed with my groupmates making the boss room’s floor covered in water and we agreed that it would fit the entire water-depression aesthetic. So I first worked on making a nice water animation inspired by how water is done in other games with a pixel art aesthetic. I used the tile-grid view on Aseprite to make a water tile that could seamlessly connect to other water tiles. I then animated it by making slight variations to the animation in each frame.

Lastly, I made the entire sprite semi transparent so that the floor below would be visible so that the player would know that the characters in the scene aren’t suddenly able to walk on water, but rather that it’s just flooded area, as though the tears of depression have covered the floor.

Floor & Wall tiles

I made a set of tiles for the floor below the flooded water. I made a basic blue tile as well as a unique tile design to interlace throughout the floor to suggest some detail. These included teardrops, reminiscent of the gate to the depression realms and some cracks to imply an old and decrepit room.

I also went on to make unique wall tiles for the boss room. These tiles were inspired by the design I made for the gate of depression (embed link) specifically in the tears and ornate design motif. The colour scheme remained dark blue to be consistent with the rest of the dungeon’s colours.

After completing the tiles I worked on creating a new boss scene with all the tiles implemented which was relatively straightforward, although somewhat time-consuming.

Thursday Session

On Thursday my group and I met with Sophie to discuss what we had for the next week. We realized that we did not have the time to implement the boss and thus decided to cut it from the game (at least for the next week’s showcase) and instead have a cutscene that plays when the player reaches the boss room.

Fade-In Work

E-Jay asked me if I could implement a fade-in visual effect between loading in to each section of the game. I believed I could do it with relative ease and looked up a tutorial.

This tutorial was helpful and allowed me to get the fade-in functional between scenes. However, I was unable to get the fade-out working. I decided to leave it and work on it at a later date as no solution I tried was working, thus I had selected to work on it in the next week.

Reflection

Overall this week was mostly about getting back into a good workflow and readying the game for a play-test in the next week. I was able to achieve most of the goals I set for myself this week and believe my team and I did a good job scaling our game appropriately.