Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 4: Character Design
Previous Week’s Work
This past week I lost a few potential days to work on my thesis in order to visit a graduate school I was accepted into. Due to this rather sudden change of plans the progress I made over these past 7 days is less than I anticipated. On the bright side of things, the work I did get done looks really clean and fun.
A few weeks ago I began to sketch out some very rough ideas of what I wanted from my 2 characters (the enemy monkey and the player zookeeper) but felt a bit overwhelmed at the prospect of having to settle and recreate any one design digitally with what I consider limited photoshop/illustrator skills.
In the images below you can see a whole zoo of messy looking monkey faces as well as a collection of gangly zookeepers. I left these sketches alone for a few weeks as I put off the process of having to create something that looks finished in favor of programming.
On Sunday I finally put my procrastination behind me and dove head first into photoshop sketching out a monkey resembling a mix of all of my sketches. This character went through a few more designs before and after I took it into Illustrator. I would rate my illustrator skills low and was unsure of how well I would be able to translate my messy pixel sketches into a confident vector image but with a bit of help from my roommate I was able to get the hang of things surprisingly quickly.
Below is the final monkey design and the 90% final player character design that I went through the same process with as the monkey. Once these two are animated and all the other game assets are in this same outline cartoon style I think my project will have a completely different and improved feel I can’t wait for others to experience.
After completing and implementing the new sprites in the working version of the game I moved onto creating a dart sprite for the player projectile. Figuring out how to get the dart to fire facing the direction the player is shooting in was a bit more tumultuous than I would have liked but I eventually figured it out and can apply the same solution to all enemy projectiles as well.
Current State of the Game
The screenshot above shows a snapshot of how the game looks after implementing all of the assets I worked on this week. While currently all the monkeys are wearing the same hat as a test, only the slow mo monkey should have the dunce cap and the sped up monkey should have a different hat to denote its type. In the upper left you can see that the special ammo clip of squares has been replaced with golden darts matching those the player fires.
The new art assets make the games aesthetics look very confused at the moment with the crafty paper style butting up against the cartoony animals. It might be a while before this is resolved but it helps me know what to work on in a way.
Looking Ahead
This next week I would like to design and implement the system that allows different monkeys to have different hats & projectiles as well as begin working on walk cycles for my two characters. Once this set of assets is done and implemented I imagine I will go back to programming and UI details for the next few weeks. Slowly but surely things are coming together with each passing week and I feel confident my vision will be realized but with little time to spare.
