I have now created some of the sprite sheets for characters within the game and I have finally begun work in Unity (Unity, 2021). Along with this, I have designed a machine that will go into the game.
To design the machine, I began by doing lots of sketches of possible machine ideas.
For most of these sketches, I looked at real life pictures and videos of both military vehicles and I wanted to combine them and give them a villainous feeling.
After sketching various ideas, I finally came up with this idea.
I was fairly happy with it so I decided to take it into Photoshop (Adobe Photoshop, 2021). Unfortunately, time is getting very short and our time is limited, so I decided to go straight into creating a sprite for this design. Here is what I came up with.
This is not my best work, but given that we need to prioritise getting a vertical slice completed, I had to make this fairly quickly. Tomas and I both agreed that we would only design and make one machine each to put in the vertical slice, just so we can get the proof of concept done (Korec, T and Waters, J. 2021.). We will aim to include more machines with a higher standard of design when we expand this project further after completion of this unit.
I also used Photoshop to create a sprite sheet, with this image (Blackthornprod, 2018.). A sprite sheet is a sequence of images that when played together create the animation for a sprite within a game. Each of the images needed to be placed vertically, one after another. Each of the images needed to be roughly the same width and height and have the same distance apart.
Once this was done, I followed the procedure outlined in Blackthornprod’s tutorial video to add this sprite sheet into Unity, create a sprite and then apply the animation sequence to it.
Here is the outcome when I created the sprite and applied the animation in Unity.
I went through the same process for the owl. I came up with two sets of sprite sheets for the owl character.
The first is for when the player is in map view, i.e. not at any particular location but in the forest.
When the owl is out in the forest, he will fly around, so I created this sprite sheet for that animation cycle. I used real footage of owls flying as reference for these drawings (BBC Earth, 2021.).
Here is how the flying sequence looks when the sprite is created in Unity
The other animation I made was for the owl walking, which would be used in the location view. Again I used video reference but it was harder to find decent quality reference for this (PETadise, 2021.).
It is not my best work but it will do for the vertical slice. Here is how this animation looks in Unity.
The next stage will be to set up this animations so that it only plays when the player clicks in an area on the location map and the owl sprite moves there.
I intend to create more animation cycles for the owl, depending on what is required based on the scenarios. I will also create sprite sheets with animations for other characters – however, we are not in a position to do this for all the characters due to time constraints and therefore, the ones that I choose to do will depend on the characters and the scenarios that we decide to include in the vertical slice as part of this unit.
References
Adobe. 2021. Adobe Photoshop 2021 (2021). [Software]
BBC Earth, 2021. The Unbelievable Flight of a Barn Owl | Super Powered Owls | BBC Earth.
Blackthornprod, 2018. HOW TO MAKE SPRITE SHEETS FOR YOUR UNITY GAME – TUTORIAL.
Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ou8VkQB2sos> [Accessed 7 December 2021].Korec, T and Waters, J. 2021. [Discussion about project] (personal communication, 30/11/21)
PETadise, 2021. [Bird] Owl Walking.
Available at: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY1gGuUa2So> [Accessed 7 December 2021].Unity Technologies. 2021. Unity (2021). [Software]