This week I finished Alien 02’s primary attack animation.
The alien, unlike its predecessor, will not fire projectiles but will instead extrude its tongue in an attempt to latch on to the player character. The tongue will do damage over time and paralyze the player, making them unable to react; move or fire for a certain period of time. The tongue will also pull the player character towards the alien’s mouth and if the player character is close enough to the mouth it will start to do some serious damage to them.
It is in the current state unclear how long the tongue will be, or rather; what range the alien will have. I would assume that it will be medium ranged – if close range is collision with hitbox and long range is the current firing range of the player and Alien 01. The idea of Alien 02 is not that it will be a huge threat in and of itself but rather a nuisance that forces the player to be consistently moving in an attempt to evade its tongue. Surely there are lots of ways to play around with the positioning of the two aliens as well as enemy composition. It will be interesting to see how our Level Designer chooses to expose the player to the extraterrestrial terrors, using enemy composition and level design effectively.
For all the animations I have done for this project, I have used Photoshop CC to animate the enemies. It has been… somewhat rough but it is certainly manageable. I have previously only used Flash CS5 for 2D animation and I can say that where Flash is smooth but illogical, Photoshop is rough but logical. Granted, Photoshop is not primarily developed for animation so it makes sense that it is not as smooth as something like Flash. There are two ways to animate in Photoshop CC, at least when it comes to the Timeline tool. You can either work in a – what would be perceived by most as a – timeline, or you can work in frames.
They both fulfill the same purpose but have different functions that work better or worse with different people in terms of preference. I find working in the timeline to be great for quickly sketching up a motion of a character or an object but I have not grasped it to the point where I know how to work in it while using layers. I know that you can add layers while inside the timeline and I’m sure you could extract the timeline into individual layers but I feel that I have more control when I work with frames. It might be because I have worked with Flash previously, I do not know.
I am punished for doing it though. If I switch between the frames, let us say I want to go from frame one all the way down to frame eight; the layers used in the first frame will be visible in every frame that comes after it. So I have to turn frame one’s layers invisible in every following frame. And then, when I have made sure that all layers correlates to their designated frames, if I want to go back to frame one I have to turn the layers from frame eight back to two invisible in all the frames they are not supposed to be visible in. I am convinced that there is not only a logical reason for this but a way or a function that makes this process much easier or removes this issue completely.
As for the animation itself it is basically just the idle animation with the fangs or jaws opening wider and the alien showing more gum. The spine tightens instead of its usual expansion and contraction, almost breathing motion. I also experimented with adding the blue pulse traveling through the spine, like some sort of electrical signal telling the alien to extrude the tongue and the player that the tongue is coming. The idea was to give some other visual feedback that the alien will extrude its tongue other than its fangs or jaws opening wider than usual. I do not yet know which version we will go with.
That is it for now. More to come next week!
/Erik Ögren