"Bluebeard" Week 7 - William Marshall - Improvements and Character Work

"Bluebeard" - William Marshall

Week 7 - Overall Project Improvement and Character Work

Intro
My 7th week marked my continuation of general project improvement, as well as finally managing to conquer my fear of character creation by creating my main character! Other than that important task, I simply asked my Tutor for a list of things to improve on with my project.

Personally, I believe that I didn't do enough this week in terms of quantity. Since I only spent a few hours working on it. However, I did get one of the scarier tasks (which I was putting off for awhile) done this week, being my main character.

Main Character Creation

My game had been lacking a main character graphic for quite some time now. Even though I knew it wouldn't be amazing, I went ahead and created my Noblewoman, after doing a few sketches based on references I was looking at.

Task 1 - Character Sketching/Main Design

In order to understand the shapes that I was working with, I used several bridal dress references due to their very large and distinctive shapes (such as the flowing lower half). I sketched out three of them before deciding on the one that I liked, which was the largest and would also be the easiest to draw, due to the large triangular shape. 

I thought this looked good for my first attempt, especially with creating human characters which I am rather unskilled with making. It suited my game style.

While I didn't actually end up using these references, these were images that I sketched from around the 3rd week, showing that I had been planning this character for quite some time. Fear of failing to meet my expectations held me back from making the character until 4 weeks later, however.

Task 2 - Character Creation + Spritesheet Setup

After I had drawn out the character, it was the simple process of dividing up the limbs in order to get it ready for Anima2D. I am quite happy at the fact that I will not need to animate the lower half as much, due to my character's feet being obscured by the large dress.

One thing that seems to be bothering me is my character's face and eye, as they look off for a reason that I can't actually figure out. Almost like a cyclops.

Project Improvements

Ghost Improvements

This was an example of when my enemy characters were first introduced. Looking at the bottom, I realised there was a lot of white alpha still left over from when I was creating it near the 'tailbone' area of the body, which threw off the whole look of the character.

Additionally, I wanted my character to become transparent to look more ghostly and ethereal.

Going into Photoshop, I removed the leftover white section in order to clean my ghost up. I also combined the entirety of the layers and simply reduced the opacity of the entire image. This successfully made my ghost see-through, just like I wanted.

When I re-imported my image, I was satisfied to see that it had worked successfully, making my ghost transparent. He was also correctly displaying the background images that were technically behind him through his body.

Ghost Particle Effects

As seen from the image above, my ghost now has two different particle effects on him to make my ghost characters a little more interesting.

• Square 'Misty' Effect
• Raindrop 'Dripping' Effect

The idea behind the two of these is that the Ghost is shifting and constantly losing form through the liquid dripping downwards, almost like an ectoplasm ooze. Using my small knowledge of particle effects, I was able to mess with the: size over time, rotation and frequency elements of my particles, rather than being the default.

In Photoshop, I created the two sprites in a few minutes by creating a raindrop and a square shape, before applying a small amount of shading/highlight to the two of them.

Mountain Background Changes

This week, my tutor pointed out that the highlights on my mountaintops were a bit too strong. As such, I knew that I needed to decrease the brightness on them, to make them uniform.

It proved to be the simple matter of changing the colour to something slightly darker within Photoshop. I then re-imported the sprite and continued on.

While this wasn't a huge change, it was still something worth writing down.

Platform Brightness

Another task which required increasing the brightness of my assets. Since my platforms were not very easy to discern between the background and the 'main' layer, it was necessary to make the platforms much brighter so that the Player could see that they were meant to be interacted with.

This was done with the same method as my mountaintops, simply changing the brightness of the asset in Photoshop.

Main Menu Changes

I coloured the key graphic that was on my main menu, finishing off the background that I had in mind.

Another change that is quite hard to demonstrate through images is the fact that my main menu is now animated. It lights up rather strongly and then darkens just as quickly, creating an animation that simply changes the gradient of my overall logo.

At first, I was using a spritesheet which manipulated the saturation of each of the titles by a small increment. However, this was quite confusing to organise and looked quite poor when I brought it into my actual game, as there wasn't a smooth transition between the different frames.

Wanting to make the transition smoother, I switched to a different method. I simply manipulated the 'color' setting on my logo and put it into an animation, so that it would smoothly change between a bright title and a dark title.

This was exactly the same method that I used for my fading screen transition.

Plans For Next Week

One thing that is crucial for my project is that my main character needs to be rigged and animated. After that? It's simply the matter of polishing and finding what improvements I can in my project. But the rigging/animation will come first, as I will fail the project otherwise.

• Main Character Rigging
• Main Character Animations
• Background Sprites
• Rain Effect
• Thunder/Lightning Effect
• Parallax Scrolling 'Front of Player' Pillars
• MUSIC