Monkey See Monkey Doom Weekly Reflection 7: The Spring Break Catch Up
Previous Week’s Work
I’d love to start this post with a deep dive into all the nuanced and dare I say life affirming(?) work I got done towards my project over spring break but in reality I’ve been playing catch up since returning to school after a 9 day hiatus.
Last week I set myself the goal of beginning the animation process I have been putting off since starting this project and over the past few days I completed the first pass of the player sprite’s basic walk cycles which you can see below. Using a few reference images for walk cycles and a version of my player sprite with movable body parts I created 4 sprite sheets each containing 9 frames of animation for Unity to bring to life. Completion of each of thee three unique cycles( the left facing walk is simply a modification of the right) took around 2.5 hours but I plan to go back through each of them at least once.
I think the forward facing walk is the most successful for both its foreshortened perspective and smoothness. The back facing walk is almost as successful but there is a few errors in the arm movement I need to correct. Left and right walk cycles clearly need a lot of work when it comes to the smoothness of both the loop and the movement.
Once all the animations seemed functional I implemented them in Unity based on the player’s x and y velocity components. This was a relatively trivial process but it did bring to my attention an issue of sprite resolution. While I have yet to completely crack the problem it seems that the size of my sprite sheets means that Unity will often scale down my massive sprites lowering their quality and pixelating them. This is frustrating and fighting through import settings and render settings to have my sprites appear relatively crisp was something I didn’t anticipate.
Following my animation work I moved on to drafting up some level obstacles that players will have to navigate around. Imagining the final setting of the game to be that of a mall or department store I designed objects that would fit in this locale(hat racks and coat racks). Each of these items will be used to create different shapes for the levels. Right now each level is the same boring rectangle and implementing these elements in different patterns will fix that.
Current State of the Game
Below is a gif showing a curren, albeit silent, piece of gameplay footage. The gif frame rate is lower than that at which the game runs at so be weary of the quality of the animations. In the gif you can see the player working through a few rounds as he is being fired at with projectiles that produce trails. Hopefully next week there are a few obstacles to make things a bit more interesting to look at.
Looking Ahead
This next week I am interested in cleaning up the animations I have already created and I also plan to animate the various monkey walk cycles for Unity implementation. Beyond this I want to start building out level variety with my obstacles which will require some refactoring of how I move from level to level but I think I will be able to figure it out.
