Hey all jammers! Just wanted to drop some tips of what I’ve picked up to animate Moth Dad! Hope you enjoy!

Here are my sketches done as soon as the jam started. Please notice how rough they are.

That’s the point of everything – to not let your logical brain kick in and tell you that you’re awful or something doesn’t look right.

Just keep drawing. Keep loose.

Not seen – 15 other sheets of doodles. XD

I spent a good half hour looking at butterflies and moths too before I finally stumbled upon moth dad, at the bottom. His pompadour was a solution for his hairline, and proved to be invaluable for his animation below.

Anyway, stumble across a good color combination that you like. Just muck around in your painting program of choice until you get 3-5 colors that go well together.

Now draw out all his body parts at a high resolution – I drew these at 4096 x 4096. When you are playing a game that is heavy on visuals, you don’t want any blur from small textures.

But again look at the image below and then above. There’s really not a ton of parts here, just lots of stretching and duplicating in Unity. His wings are the same copy of the wing shape I drew above, just a different shade and stretched and thrown behind him. He’s a very simple creature with lots of cheating! 😀

Then came the animation. I actually did two passes on this guy – the two major frames of “bob down then up”, then added another set of frames for his hair and beard, that start at a different time to stretch him out a little as he moves. Please note that his legs are splines – they are generated when the game is being played and simply draw a point from his torso to his  knee position, then finally his foot position.

I’d highly recommend getting a copy of “The Animator’s Surivial Kit” by Richard Williams to help you ease into animation. I am not means an expert on anything, but I hope that I was informative to someone out there!

Thanks all! You can see Moth Dad and more (I did have to animate four other creatures!) in 10DaysOfDreaming.

Play Here!

The two of us had a great 72 hours.

Ten days of dreams, transforming, and story. Very narrative heavy. Goes great with a cup of tea.

Play Here!

Hey all! We’re a team of eight people working on a shoot ’em up for this jam! Above is art from out two talented artists Kiririn51 (http://kiririn51.tumblr.com/) and Shout(http://shoutscion.tumblr.com/). Both have an array of impressive games under their belts and we couldn’t be happier to have them!

The last gif is me showing off engine…please ignore the placeholder art. 😉

TEAM BREAK DOWN
x3 Programmers (101010011)
x2 Artists  (So talented!)
x2 Music/sound bros (We’re so lucky to have them!)
x1 Project manager (Who stayed up until 6 AM getting our task list out! Props!)

We’ll be updating when possible, can’t wait to get more done and implemented! 😀

– (Team) A Gang of Skeleton Otters

Morning all, prepare for a picture dump!

Our progress from last night – we’re gutting a ImpactJS demo, hence the Mario World sprites, but Pico was working on the toggle blocks, and I managed to get sprites and a orb to follow with Troika as she moved.

Oh, right! Meet Troika. She’s currently a weird deer thing that can fly. The orb above her is a power-up applied to her.

First off, we are a team of 1-3, with a plus or minus of another 3. The core team was really just Pico and I (Veo) online last night, hanging out in a Google Hangout and churning out ideas. Both being programmers with a passion for game development, we were actually dead in the water for a good hour and a half trying to figure out what our game was going to be.
Our idea – you only get one powerup at a time.

Then everything started to fall into place.

Becase we are using ImpactJS, a javascript framework posed for platformer making, we we under the gun to figure out something for a platformer that adhered to the theme well. After getting set up with Git and Webstorm and local servers, we started to plan and around 11 PM we were finally able to get our heads ‘down’ and start programming.

Today we have a meeting with my brother for musician, I have my buddy Hiyada up for spriting, and I have a list of shit we need to do today, including player moveset tweaking, monsters, the power up stations…. woot woot.

One thing I’m learning is to not get stressed out over this. People are the hardest part of a project. We were having huge issues with google hangouts last night with people not being able to talk, two of my programmers are both still in finals and I still have to ramp them up on the engine, and since I don’t manage the Amazon Cloud Instance, I can’t push the production build out onto the website until Pico gets up.

I just need to learn to breath, I think. ^__^;;