Game Project.

Character Drawings

At the start of the project we decided as a group we wanted the characters to follow a school trip theme as the game will be an educational, travel-based tool for audiences from 11-15. This led to the idea of having a school kid being the main protagonist in the story with the enemies being the teachers that lose the kid while on a school trip abroad. For the designs I went with a cartoonish style which would make it more appealing for the target audience and easier to put together in Maya. The character drawings helped picture the concept of the game and gave the team ideas to what more can be added and carried over into the storyboards.

Storyboards

3D Character Models

Animating Characters

When it came to animate the characters, I firstly had to create a rig to enable the joints of the model to move. Once this had been completed, I went on to follow a video to make the run animation for my characters. Link to video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCpotGr0TB4) I used the video as a guide to create the animation, by pausing it at each frame to see the important changes in the characters movement. I also looked at the animated walk cycles in the book called the 'Animator's Survival Kit by Richard Williams' as a reference to help me understand that each frame, the whole body of the character is moving differently as it walks.

Sprite Sheets

Using the animation’s, I made in Maya for the different characters, I generated the frames as individual PNG images. They then were placed as PNG images in a CSS sprite generator which puts them all into a grid. From that it is loaded as a single image which I can give to the developer in our team to place into Unity. I’ve made sprites sheets for each of the characters walk cycles, but also for the net and jump animations for the main character in the game.