Backside Animation

I finished the side view of the attack animation, so now I worked on back view animation.  This was a bit of a challenge because of the perspective change. Furthermore, a lot of the motion of the enemy is from the front view, so there isn't much seen from the backside. With that said I managed to get a back animation that shows enough to know that enemy is doing a jabbing motion.

Pixelizing My Sketch

Sketching the animation, took a couple of days, and I liked the way it turned out. I now need to add color as well as make the sketches have the pixel look to it. I initially thought that sketching then importing/tracing would be easier but it turned out to be much more annoying. Since I sketched on a larger canvas, I had to rescale/reposition all the individual frames when I brought them to the main file. This wasn't really challenging but rather just tedious work. However, once I finished the tracing I feel that the pixel animation turned out rather well.

Preparing for Attack

We are now beginning the second sprint. I had finished the walk animation in 4 directions for the Pikeman. Now I am going to start on creating the attack animation for the enemy.  My idea for the Pikeman is to do a lunging-thrust type of attack.  I want to make the attack start from standing still as well.
I figured that I would start with just sketching the animation and then importing to my main character PSD file so that I can trace. Since I used brushes instead of pencil to draw the sketch, I figured I would make the sketch canvas larger than the main 64x64 size.

 From the quick gif I made, this looked like a good animation to aim for.

Walking

We're wrapping up the first sprint this week. I worked on getting a walk animation for the pikeman.  At first this looked to be one of the most difficult tasks to achieve; however, after looking online for walking cycles, I found a good sprite sheet of a walk cycle and I essentially traced the frames.

I found this to be so much easier to finish than trying to draw the cycle from just from my mind. However, although tracing was relatively easy, adding detail, like previose works was tedious.

Starting Pixels

The new week brought some interesting work along with it.  The previous concepts were mainly using smoother brushes and not pixel based.  I tried to to get into the pixel style now.  I based the concepts off of drawings given to me. The first one is a light-armor soldier, while the second one is a heavier armor concept. I will admit that it was difficult to get the top-down perspective at first. Trying to add detail when working with such a small amount of space was the most challenging thing to achieve.  After a few attempts, I think I managed to get the perspective down.

Getting Into Character Concepts

This week, I talked with fellow artist teammates and suggested that we could possibly make some character/enemy concepts. The game takes place in the Aztec era. The main enemy are the Spanish conquistadors. I went for a more cartoony look for the character. I also tried to get the character clothing to match that of the armor set so commonly associated with conquistadors of the time.  I did learn that I should have made it on a smaller canvas.  I originally made this on a very large canvas then scaled it down. I noticed that the quality changed a bit, perhaps for the worse.