Space Shooter Project. Blog 4. Eagle Animation

So for this week I am going to go through a movement animation for one of our game enemies – The Eagle. It is not one of the higher priority animations for our game however which is why its creation has been delayed quite a bit. It is also not entirely completed yet, but an atlas has been made so the programmers have something to use and try the basic animation with. So a short summary of what part the eagle play in the game:

The eagle patrols the map in a set pattern. The entirety of the eagle is not visible to the player though. The only thing the player will see is a shadow floating on the ground. This is to give the impression of the eagle being high up in the air, scouting for pray. If the player collide with the shadow, a screeching sound will be heard and he/she will only have a short time to escape underground. Should the player remain on the surface, the eagle will swoop from the border of the screen and catch you, which is what the animation is for. Because the animation will only really play once you get caught, the completion priority has been pretty low.

Above is the first draft for the eagle atlas. At the top you see the shadow which will be floating around on the map. Second down is simply the original sprite, it is not entirely necessary to involve since the frame is in the animation as well. It is more a matter of emphasizing which frame to use for the eagle to move without any animation to it. Third down is what is supposed to (eventually) be the flyby grab animation.

So style wise it is pretty straight forward and follows the art guidelines for a game. This includes a black outline, primary colors, a highlight on the primary color, and a shadow. It is supposed to depict a bald eagle. The reason for choosing just the bald eagle is because of its rather unique appearance with the white head and tail feathers. Additionally it is one of the more well-known eagle families and my hope is that it will help to understand the connection towards a predator bird and thus an enemy of the player. This despite the bird not really being shown for a majority of the gameplay. The shadow outline is more important and I tried to make the feathers look a bit edgy but not entirely sure whether it succeeded or not. My personal opinion is that the shadow could probably be emphasized a lot more to tell the player that it is an enemy.

As far as the animation goes I am not entirely happy with it. It is however, missing quiet some frames that is going to make it feel more complete. Some things that I plan to do is make the wing movement a lot more radiant and noticeable since it is rather stiff and uninteresting at the moment. Additionally I will need to add some frames where the bird shrinks in size to tell that it is descending down towards the ground.

It did present a bit of a challenge for me to do this animation for various reasons. I have never really animated anything before so this fact slowed me down a little. The top down perspective also presents some difficulties, mostly in how to make things look interesting and believable at the same time. Also the nature of this particular animation in the sense that it starts out as a shadow, then spawns outside the screen and swoop in, and it has to look like its coming from a higher altitude. So I’ll wait and see how this first early version look and feel in the game and then make adjustments accordingly.