To start week ten of development on Kessler I designed the initial designs for the other two characters found within the game's bunker, Donald's father and Grandfather.
Above is the design for the grandfather. I went for the hunched-over cane look to show that he is very old and struggling to walk by showcasing all the stereotypical old things about him like the lack of hair usually associated with elderly men. Below is the design for the father who is very generic and wearing gym gear since in the bunker he will be found running on the treadmill.
After creating the designs for these two characters as well as the first two I had to create the sprite sheets for their animations and to do this I used the Prototype Hero sprite map I downloaded from the unity asset store (shown above in week seven) and took it into Microsoft paint and painted the characters designs into the poses they needed.
The Grandfather does not move around the level in any way which is why as shown above I only drew a few frames of idle animation which makes the chest of the character move up and down to simulate breathing and his walking stick moving back and forth a pixel. You also may notice that the character now has a nose compared to the original design a bit further up in this week's post I did this because the lack of a nose made the design look wrong and gave an uncanny valley-type feeling which added the one extra pixel to simulate a nose negated.
The Mother is similar to the grandfather in the fact she does not move around the map so she only requires an idle animation. Firstly the mother's design was completely changed in favor of a more compact design that was easier to replicate for multiple frames than the original pink-dressed design which was also a bit too bright of a color which I believed would take away from the background elements around her. The mother idle animation involves simple breathing-like animation which has her chest move up and down as well as the bottom of the dress move to accommodate her moving chest, you may also notice that in two of the four frames used in this animation, the mother's eye is closed this is used to simulate a blinking effect within the character where every few frames she closes her eyes, which is shown by the appearance of a slightly darker shade of her skin color appearing instead of the black and white pixels that usually make up the eyes.
The Father has a bit more complex animation than the mother and grandfather because he unlike them is found in the bunker level of the game running on a treadmill meaning that he requires a running animation. The 8 frames that are used to create this run animation work by playing one after another and moving the father's arms and legs in slightly different intervals to keep an 8-bit style animation as well as simulate running. Unlike the mother, the father does not blink whilst running and I decided on this because I thought that the idea of the father blinking every few frames whilst running might seem dangerous since he is running at high speeds and having his eyes closed a lot may be a bad idea.
This is the most intense animation sheet I completed this week and that is because it is for the main character Donald who the player controls throughout the entire game which means that the sheet needs to have all the movement animations to encompass the entire game, which at this stage is the run animation, the idle animation, and the jump animation. The idle animation for Donald is similar to that of the Mother in the way that it is a breathing-like animation where the chest of the character moves up and down which is made easy to see through the use of the slightly different shades of coloring on Donald's clothing as without this you would not be able to tell is the character was breathing or not as the breathing is animated by adding and removing a few pixels to the arms and the chest to simulate the up and down movement of breathing. The idle animation for Donald also includes like the Mother a blinking type motion where every other frame has the character with their eyes shut once again simulated by a slightly darker tone of the character's skin color. I decided to do this for Donald as since the player will be looking at Donald for the majority of the Game there will be a lot of times when the player will stop to look at the environment, take a break or listen to the dialogue and the blinking will make this idling seem more realistic than just a bouncing up and down breathing simulation. The run animation is the animation that the players will be seeing the most as this will play whenever Donald moves, the run animation is the same template used for the Father's run animation however just colored using MS Paint to be Donald. The most interesting part about Donald's Run animation as appose to the Fathers is that Donald's clothing has parts that would flap in the wind as they move, and I took this into account whilst drawing the animation frames for Donald's Run. The red hoodie that they wear is where all of this extra movement is shown with the hood moving up and down with a few frames as well as the hoodies tassels. These tassels are the parts of the extra movement for Donald that are the most notable as they a small meaning that they are more likely to be forced around whilst the character is running. Lastly for Donald's animations is the jump animation which is done using the same ideas as the running animation in which Donald's hoddie elements would move in this animation when Donald is going up, shown in the first two frames the hood is forced down by air resistance that is combating their movement. But as Donald comes down the hood is forced upwards and so are the tassels to showcase how the hoddie would react to gravity being imposed upon it, shown in the last three as Donald falls back towards the ground.
Once all four of those characters had been designed I then moved on to adding the animations into Unity to do this I had to first off put all of my character sheets into Photoshop and remove the backgrounds to make the backgrounds transparent and save them.PNG files, I had to do this since MS paint docent support transparency. Once I had done this I put the grandfather's sprite sheet into Unity first and then had to change the sheet to say it contained multiple sprites then edit the sprite in the sprite editor and slice into the correct frames which created the correct assets for the grandfather, after doing this I then grabbed and dragged the first frame of the grandfather's animation into the scene. I then created an animation for the grandfather and dragged all the correctly sliced sprites into it and then separated them so they did not run really quickly but instead at a paste of 6 frames. After that, I then repeated these actions for the Mother and the Father's sprite sheets furthermore since all three of these sprites are Non-playable characters that don't move from their designated spots within the scene no settings had to be changed for animation transitions within the animator as soon as the scene starts they run the animations they are given.
Next, I did the same with Donald's sprite sheet, separating it into the correct sprites and then adding the first sprite of the idle animation to the sprite renderer in Donald's character. I then took those sprites and changed the sprites within the prototype animations I had already set up for Donald back in week seven, I did this as then I did not have to reset up Donald's animator and could use the animator that I used previously with new and improved sprites that it now controls.
Once that was completed, later on in the week I moved on to setting up and coding the player interaction system which will make it possible for the players to click on an object and see what it says or trigger a sound or event. I did this firstly for the first piece of lore the player will find which is a letter left for Donald by their Mother asking them to come meet them by the computers later today.
