WRECKLESS RALLY Art Process | Part 5: At Last, Some Animation
Previously: Part 4: Staying Sane During A Jam
Art Process Part 5: At Last, Some Animation
Vroom Vroom
Some of our titles, such as Artax for Ludum Dare 39, have a lot of animation work. Some have less. As it turns out, Wreckless Rally is one of the latter. The car sprites are rotated by means of @daanvanyperen's mystical programming magic, and exist of just two frames where there's a very bare-bones lighting shift on the tires. The advantage is that this gives me a lot of time for environment sprites, but I do want to keep up my animation practice this jam.
Combo, dingdingding!
Ah, great! Here's a good opportunity to animate, albeit a short one. What will add some game juice is a sexy effect to make successful combos pop. I have a look at a Bejeweled video on YouTube at 25% playback speed, and see that they briefly enlarge the sprites before shrinking them down. I decide to add an additional flash effect, and we have a nice dynamic scoring effect.
Caution, Slippery
The oil slick sprite I made doesn't really pop off the screen enough. We do want the plays to notice them, so I set out to make them more noticeable. I start with my original unmoving sprite, which is a simple dark grey with a subtle colourful oily outline and ripple shapes.
A simple shine animation, where a bright line passes across the sprite, should do the trick. There are various ways to execute this - you can add a secondary glimmer shooting across after the main glimmer, or have the glimmer shoot back across the oil slick, for instance. I decide to keep it simple, as we are on day 3 of the jam already, and there's more polishing to be done.
Now to add some oily colours to it. I choose green, blue and purple - like the outline I had put on the sprite originally, but much lighter. You can add yellows and reds to oil as well (anything goes, really), but I do not want to overdo it.
Hmm, it still just looks like a plain line moving across the sprite. So I have the effect spread out across the outline a little, and also hit the little drops that splattered outside of the main slick.
Much better, it adds a lot more life to a simple dark stain on the tarmac already.
Ready, Set, Go!
And finally, the last thing we need is some starting lights, to get things going. I start with a giant 16-light setup like in Formula 1 at first, but then simplify this down to a basic four light red-to-green count. The big setup is probably not clear enough to players unfamiliar with Formula 1, after all.
The Finish Flag
That about concludes my art process postmortem blog posts. As I said at the start, the animations this jam are few and simple, but I am glad there was something to animate - gotta keep practicing! Looking back now, I don't have too many regrets regarding the graphics. I kind of messed up on the dirt tiles a little, deciding to start with only a vertical border between it and the tarmac, and then awkwardly adding diagonal borders separately from vertical borders which don't line up that well. But it's subtle and I felt I could get away with it.
And with that we reach the end. I hope you've enjoyed these blog posts, and that they might help you in your own process in the future. Thanks for reading!
