Spent the first couple of days this week working on the character design. Once I got the idea down I stopped work on the picture, so it’s still kind of sketchy – which, with the digital painting style I was using, mostly means blurry and not very well defined. Maybe I’ll finish the picture up sometime and make it nice enough to show off, but for now it’s served its purpose of helping me figure out what the character looks like.
I decided that the clothes were distracting and made the character seem less, rather than more, supernatural, as well as more artificial. I eventually settled on a pretty normal human face because everything weirder I tried just ended up looking kind of goofy, and replaced the glowy eyes I had before with stone eyes, which reinforces the idea of a living statue made out of natural materials, which is in a rough sense what she’s supposed to be. In the end, I feel like I have a character who looks decidedly more than human without being showoffy – something I tend to find tedious, when people just try to communicate power through lots of glowy lights and oversized gear and whatnot.
Anyway, with the design finished, even if the painting of the design wasn’t, I went back and revisited what I was working on before, the spear-throwing version of the entity. I mostly just worked on the attack animation, which I actually really enjoyed since it’s an interesting movement that turned out pretty well. I really wanted to sell the power and impact of this attack, since it’s going to be a one-shot attack that leaves the enemy as the basic knife-wielding version after: I need something very obvious and telegraphed, but that moves fast and hits hard, and I think that this animation will work, albeit possibly with a bit of timing tweaking.
So probably what’s up for this week is doing the other animations for the spear version of the enemy, which are mostly just the normal walk/run/turn animations but holding a spear instead of a knife, then trying to get the enemy implemented in-game – the actual behavioral part should be easy, just the basic version of the enemy with a few more lines about when and how to use the spear attack, but creating the spear attack itself will actually take a bit longer, since it’s the first projectile I’ve made that needs to orient the animated object along the path it’s moving. There will probably be many more like that in the game, though, so it’ll pay to do it right.
I think I also want to do a thorough breakdown of what needs to be done for me to finish the first chapter of the game. It doesn’t necessarily need to be in-depth – I can figure out what specific entity animations I’ll need when I get to each entity – but a list of what areas need to be created as maps, what area assets need to be created, what entities need to be finished, what coding needs to be done, etcetera. I want a road map so I can really get a sense of how close or far I am, and come to the project each day with a sense of direction rather than figuring out what I’m doing anew every few days. Maybe even something I can put up on my wall so I don’t forget about it.