Animation was a crucial part to make the idea of an animated game come to life. It's extremely challenging to demonstrate the vision and message of a game in a static form. Animation makes the overall idea engaging and interactive for the people who are viewing the idea. If the game was being presented to potential investors to receive funding then being able to show the interaction feature of the game will leave no one guessing about the message. It's a chance to get across the point without the message being distorted or misleading left by the investors when they try to work out how the rest of the game will look from the static images.
Once the animation got underway It became clear that there were some aspects that hadn't been prepared for. The issues that I had come across wasn't down to anything design related but instead was down to the structure of the game and how it would actually run along side the animation. The first issue was that originally the beach level was set up so that Donald Trump would be essentially chased by the incoming tide. As I prepare to animate the level I came to the sudden realisation that I couldn't animate the sea chasing Trump and for Trump to still kill incoming components. If the sea was chasing him down and he suddenly stopped the sea would catch him within 2 seconds leaving no time to kill anyone. With this in mind I needed to think of a solution. Showing Trump killing people along the level was crucial to the overall message of the game, therefore I couldn't afford to remove this crucial section to the game. I ended up removing the sea, the sea would still appear at the start but would disappear after a few seconds, giving the illusion that the sea was still chasing him but Trump had out-ran the sea. With the removal of the sea, I also removed the who chasing aspect. Donald Trump wouldn't be chased by anything, therefore he could stop and kill who ever without the potential of being caught by anything. This essentially fixed the problem.
Lastly, because my knowledge in animation is still very limited I wasn't sure how to animate Donald Trump and the other characters in the game to make it look like they were actually running or moving across the beach. I didn't have the ability to make it realistic but that's the beauty of 8 bit games. 8 bit retro game are simplistic and possess no realistic abilities, therefore I could get away with minimal animation. The other advantage was the fact that the characters were only seen in one position and only running in one direction, which saved me time as I ended up using the same method and just applying it to different characters. I researched into how figures were animated in 8 bit games and there wasn't a particular method that was consistent across all game. In the end I had to use my imagination and the research I had undertook to animate the legs off Donald Trump and the others. Essentially, the method I used was to have one leg appear at one time and then alternate from leg to leg. (Hard to explain, so the animation below will explain)
Comp 1_8 from Jack Solomon on Vimeo.
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