Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Ofcourse,someadditional readingcanhelpyoudramatically.Therearemanyuseful
topics about animation. One of my favorite ones is
The Animator's Survival Kit
writ-
ten by
Richard Williams
, who directed the animation process on the famous master-
piece
Who Framed Roger Rabbit
by
Robert Zemeckis
. The topic includes a lot of
helpful information and many wonderful illustrations.
Before starting the animation process, you should create a list of all actions your
character will do. This can help you plan your efforts in advance. In this particular
case, the game will use the following types of basic animated sequences:
• Standby
• Walking/running cycle
• Jumping
• Shooting
• Concussion
Recall from
Chapter 1
,
Starting the Game
, games store animations in special sprite
sheets files, which consist of frames collected together in one big image. This is a
little tricky because it requires an additional phase in the production of the animation:
you first create a motion sequence, then export all frames as individual images, and
finally arrange them in one file. Remember that there are special tools for working
with sprite sheets such as
TexturePacker
that help collect files and have some use-
ful extra abilities. Nevertheless, you can manage everything by using Adobe Flash
and Adobe Illustrator. The following figure demonstrates graphic elements that the
protagonist consists of:
The workflow begins in Adobe Illustrator using which a game character is developed.
In an ideal case, the artwork is totally vector based and does not include any com-
plicated elements such as special opacity modes for shapes (
Screen
,
Multiply
,
Over-
lay
, and so on), meshes, and raster-based effects; therefore, it can be easily trans-
ferred to Adobe Flash via a clipboard. It is better to group relative elements togeth-
er, for instance, all elements of a head should be grouped together. If the artwork is
made of raster effects, textures, and so on, it is better to divide the character into
individual moving parts, such as legs, arms, and palms, and export each of them as
separate PNG files (slices can help to make this).
