If any of the animated 2D fantasy work I have been posting has appealed to you - or if you are a fan of puzzle platformers in the spirit of Lost Vikings then I would encourage you to go over and check it out!
Grave Danger - Flying Ranged Enemy
Here is the ranged version of the flying enemy for the Train World. I wanted to add in a tech element that matched the world and give it a more armored feel so it will exist as more of a threat.
15 Frame idle animation - for when he is chilling.
Flying with intent.
Firing loop.
And a bonus 15m sketch. The prompts were for a vehicle with the tags "Loner" + "Prairie".
Grave Danger - Flying Melee Enemey
This was one of my first concept rounds at JB gaming - so lots of range trying to figure out the right mixture of scary and goofy.
We needed a generic flying enemy for Grave Danger's initial development. I started out a few months ago with a blob enemy covered in tentacles but didn't know enough about Spine to make it work. Here I am coming back to a more general purpose design with a bit more work under my belt and things are working out better.
I decided to animate the wings by hand and not with a rig due to the complexity of the perspective and animation, so started up drafting a few tests in Photoshop before drawing out the sprites and putting it all together in Spine.
Initial test.
Revision 2 with the body assets blocked in.
Blocked in the wings.
'Slow' 15 frame idle animation. The up and down strokes are held for a few frames and the tips of the wings are deformed with bones for a bit more organic look.
Here is the desert skin in the "Aggro" animation. The mouth can't open much larger than this at the moment.
Next stop will be to duplicate this project and create a ranged version with a projectile weapon below where the tenticals are.
Update: Removed the blur on the wings for now at the suggestion from a friend and I feel that it matches the game style much better than before. It was his opinion - and I agree - that the path blur I was using before looked more like a DoF effect and not like motion! Thanks, John!
Also tweaked the wing membrane color for the desert themed bat. Will hold final judgement for when he is in game.
And a bonus melee attack animation I forgot to export last time.
Grave Danger - Enemy Skin Test WIP June 16 2016
Finally got around to adding in Spine's really solid skin system and applying it to the default enemy rig.
Because the heads are all slightly different (and have different bones and animations) I had to kind of work around that by creating and attaching empty blank images to the skins for inactive heads. Im sure there is a better way but a brief search didn't reveal anything and we are on a deadline! This seems to work, but I'd love to know about other approaches.
The standard weakest 'train engineer' variant. Right now only the weapon, skin color, headgear and wrist strap are different, however if given the time I can make all the assets custom.
Maybe a bit too aggressive for the game, but will see if it grows on me. I think he is pretty badass regardless.
Next step is to create a "Caster" / "Shaman" version and add in some more general use animations.
Grave Danger - Train Level WIP June 10 2016
Here are some early shots of all the pieces finally put together in Unity and set in motion along with an 80% final train interior asset set.
Many of the exterior assets have simple scripts attached to jitter them in place however the wheels were animated in Spine.
Still has a lot of polish to go! Check out https://twitter.com/GraveDangerGame to follow along with development.
Characters and character animations were created by Tony Ferguson
Currently the chairs are too big and nothing is animated, but things are snapping together pretty well. Other than the insane amount of layers to work with contraction and expansion things are pretty straight forward.
Grave Danger train level animation progress
The wheels worked out better than I had hoped! Due to the construction method of the asset however, I still haven't seen everything moving together so the next step will be to assemble in Unity so I can have an easily* updatable file in motion that I can use for reference.
I suspect the amount of z sorting will be a holy hell to work through, but it SHOULD all work...
Thrumming with life!
... never synchronized /o\
Activated and ready to kill
Firing but without any particle effects...
Disabled!
Bots Battleground - "Berserk"
One of the last designs for the second round of Bots Battleground work. Billed as a falling apart psychopath I incorporated lots of haphazard elements including substantial battle damage and "Jokeresque" face paint.
As the last step of finalization, I went in and activated the long dormant gradient map layers to create each of the 4 team's colored variations. I then created Layer comps in conjunction with the image generator to automatically export out all 4 versions every time any changes were made to the files. Adobe's automation stuff is really kicking ass, and other than a few issues did everything I hoped it would.
One of my biggest hangups that I knew would be a problem was not having all the files loaded into a master document. I had heavily considered it, but for the scope of the contract I wasn't convinced that the efficiencies would pay off... I also didn't know how the client's computer would react to 100+ smart objects and 700+ layers...
This was a great full spectrum project. It helped me work out more efficient pipelines and introduced me to a great guy and team to work with. Can't wait to get my set!
For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!
Bots Battleground - "Copycat" and "Cash"
More work from the second phase of Bots Battleground Designs.
The Copycat was designed to function as a scanner so wanted to keep it looking very observant with the laser and large optics.
The Cash was billed as a mecha piggy bank so decided to weaponize it as a boar with missiles for tusks and 3 cannon nostrils with a vault door on the side for added security.
For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!
Bots Battleground - "Circuit" and "Phantom"
I've had this work sitting around for awhile and finally getting some of it posted!
Wanted to keep the Circuit light and agile looking and took some cues from WIFI routers to flesh out the look of a hacking capable design.
Originally billed as a ghostly like translucent robot things changed and now only its spinning neck blades are incorporeal. The world needs more bladed ponchos in my opinion.
For more information about the game, check out the successfully funded KickStarter page!
Bots Battleground - Promotional Illustration
Last but not least here is the promotional illustration I did for the box art.The goal was to have 4 bots fighting within a set ratio and with a border that faded to black.
A big shout out goes to my friends who helped me with the layout, posing and readability of this piece. Your feedback helped me immensely!
And that is it for now! Be sure to check out the Kickstarter if any of this interests you and hopefully there will be more to come!
Bots Battleground - "Menace" and "Swarm"
The "Menace" is another of the FX laden bots that will probably need to be revisited. Embarrassingly I hadn't had many chances to paint electricity and so after arriving at something passable we decided to move on and circle around once the project clears. I wanted to post it regardless because I like the design and didn't want things to seem like everything was on cruise control on my end.
The "Swarm" was the last bot done for the initial run and took by far the longest at around 9 hours due to its requirements and back and forth. For simplicity and budget sake I turned the component bots into glorified rectangular prisms with little legs and triangle eyes and tried to blend them together into the bot's blob like form. It mostly worked out well and I really love the idea of them heating up to melt down scraps in order to recycle them into the swarm.
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!
Bots Battleground - "Boom" and "Leech"
The "Boom" was fairly straight forward as a suicide bot. I only needed 4 thumbs and 3 of them incorporated the Sea Mine shape as its core from the start. I wish I had had the time to do a quick block model of the sphere and detection horns to keep them properly distributed and in perspective but I think it came together well as is.
The "Leech" was a bit on the complicated side but came together as something you wouldn't want to hug you so... Mission accomplished!
Check out Bots Battleground and Boogie Dice over on Kickstarter!