Hello again, everyone! I’m back again to write about my work on our team project “Potato Pirates” one last time. It’s been a journey to say the least, as this is the first time I’ve been a part of the development of an actual game.
Lately, the work I’ve been doing on the game is mostly smaller touch ups like updating older graphics assets so that they follow our visual style guide. That is basically also what the task I’m going to write about this week was all about, but in this case it took a little bit of more work than the other artifacts I’ve been working on since last week.
Although I was the one who made it, I’ll be the first to admit that the sprite and animation for our old player controlled character didn’t have the quality that I wished that it did. Not only did it have to be recolored and given a new outline to fit with the aesthetic style that the rest of the game has, but the version of it when it turns to either side was constructed wrong, so that the perspective wasn’t correct.
I thought about how I could solve the problem of correcting the perspective, and eventually realized that it would be the easiest if I recreated the avatar from scratch, instead of trying to just make the new perspectives and to make the details match up with those of the idle state of the plane (the state where it flies straight ahead).
Even as I made extra care to make all the details on the plane match up correctly, it proved to be quite a challenge. Systematic perspective isn’t exactly my strong suite, and this task forced me to think in three dimensions instead of just two.
I started out by just drawing the main body of the airplane in it’s own Photoshop layer. I then drew the details of the plane as seen from straight from above. I put guidelines at the edges of details to help me with drawing them correctly from other perspectives as well.
When it came to drawing the details from other viewing angles I made the perspective by free hand using trial and error instead of using proper vanishing points. This is something that I may have done differently if I went through the process again.
At this stage, the animation was still in a very rough state, and my goal was mainly to make sure that it “felt right” before I polished it. After making the wings as a plain box-shape first, I then went on to refining their shape after getting the first stage right.
I tried experimenting a little bit with color while the animation was still in the “rough” state before going on to polish it. I found that when all the tail fins were red, as in the old avatar, it was hard to distinguish the top fin from one animation frame to a side fin in the next. Because of this, I decided to make the side fins yellow. I also added in more yellow to the wings to break up the red a bit more.
After feeling that I had a clear base of how the avatar would appear, I went on to polish and refine it, making sure that it was symmetrical, in the right size, and colors and outline following the visual style guide. During this process I also added the propeller animation I had created earlier.
Due to feedback from others in my team, I decided to not make the plane use the full tilt when tilting downwards, as it appeared like the perspective was wrong even though it was the exact same as when it tilted upwards.
Due to how the animation is loaded by the game engine, we were also unable to use the “in-between-frame” when the plane tilted downwards without rewriting some of the code. We decided together to skip it and have the avatar snap directly to the new perspective.
After I was done polishing it, I then baked the individual frames into a sprite sheet using GlueIT, and implemented it into the game, replacing the old avatar in the process.
As this is my last blog post about this project, I’ll take this moment to say a goodbye of sorts. Until next time, and next project!
If you wish to download our game to play it yourself, you can do so here: https://bitbucket.org/potatopirates/potato-pirates/downloads/Potato%20Pirate%20Installer.zip
Peo Björn Johansson 
Sup Peo!
First I just want to say that I’m actually really impressed with the effort you’ve been putting into this project. Great job! Your blog posts have all also been kept very professional which I appreciate even tho I’m just supposed to look at and read one of them x) Anyway, you’ve managed to create some great improvements for the plane in your game. Now it looks oh so much more slick when compared to the previous version.
When I read through your post the first thing I reacted to was how good your English was. It made your post really enjoyable to read. You have a good description of your entire work and thought process, making it easy to follow along with the decisions you made. I however think that the decision you and your team made on the plane not having the same amount of tilt when tilting downwards was an odd decision. It’s to bad your in-between-frames didn’t make the cut into the final game, because they made the plane look a lot more enjoyable to fly around with 🙂 The color palette for the plane is really cozy as well.
In the end your game runs smoothly and is fun so congratulations, and I’m also looking forward to see your new game during theme park! 😀
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