Backgrounds and settings

After starting the test stage I realised that I'd want to focus on art assets first instead on the tech side of things so I went ahead and added a background loop of some trees and clouds so it's a little more interesting than just the floor and a white background.

They are a little basic but I kind of feel like that lends to the feel of the game. Maybe the trees need updating but honestly they seem to be adding too much clutter to the scene. I might have to get a woodcutter in to deal with it...

I also need to have some prompts on which buttons to press to move the character since they aren't traditionally 'WASD' by default, they're arrow keys which is just confusing to us gamers.

Building the level

Now I have my character design sprites in place, I've gone ahead and started building a test level in Construct 2 to try and understand how the program works. It seems incredibly straightforward but I'm sure I'll find a way to struggle with it. It runs on conditions and if statements, much like Visual Basic (I did computing in college) but in a more user friendly manner and not just lines of writing code.

For the time being I've gone ahead and made a grass floor sprite so Ella has something to walk on when she's in the game world. The idea is to have some floor sprites with gaps in them when they're covered in paint which aren't solid so Ella can fall through them, thats for a future patch though.

Here's a first draft of the grass:

Casting with and without the brush

So to recap, Ella will be starting off in the game world without the 'magical brush' so there needed to be a whole other set of animations with her not holding the brush. This, in truth, was pretty easy, it was just a case of taking all the animations I already had and deleting the brush from her hand. It was more of the duplication of all the images which added on to an already mounting file size so I have to keep the storage use down somehow to keep the game running smooth. I'll probably end up saving everything in a PNG format so that should solve the file size issue.

Anyway, here's the animation sprites for Ella when she's casting with the brush (for the sprites without, just imagine no brush):

Is that jumping?

Errr, honestly I don't know what to make of this one. Really, I have tried to make it look as natural of jump as possible but I'm not entirely convinced. Maybe it's just me over-analysing it or maybe I've just been looking at it that long that it's starting to look so, so wrong. Kind of like whenever you read a word over and over until you've begun to question it's existence in the Oxford Dictionary as a legitimate word. Or maybe that's just me too...

Moving on:

I mean there's two things I need to take into consideration here, the first being that Ella won't (normally) be jumping this frequently so it's unlikely to be a major concern. The second being the fact that even while typing this, why is the animation so nauseating? Hang on, let me find a bucket (and maybe scroll down past the animation).

Where was I? Oh yeah, the second point is that while I'd like there to be more frames to properly portray the jump and fall, I get the daunting feeling that it may become a hassle to code so I'm going to want it as simple as possible without going into too much detail.

Now, where's that bucket again?

Animating Ella

So now I've got the basic design down to how I like it, I've started animating her model. Now, you've already seen the 'idle' animation, but just in case you missed that post, here it is again (with the added shaders and no jitter this time... hopefully):

I think I'll have to point out that the quality of gifs aren't brilliant (they look fine locally, honest) but I'm sure you're getting the general gist of the animation here. I've also managed to get the 'walk' one done too. This took a while since it was a struggle going back and forth through Photoshop and Illustrator and tweaking the movement to look like an actual person walking. That and making sure there were enough frames for the animation to run smoothly. Again I can't count for upload quality but the basics are all there:

*Upon review, I've noticed it's just the 'idle' that looks shoddy, should be fixed in a future patch...

**I've also now noticed that it's to do with the lack of transparency on the second image, meaning it has a white background instead of none at all.

Refining the style

I've played a little with having solid black outlines and having the line work that I used in my past post on Ella, and having seen the two differences, I've come to the conclusion that I prefer it the first way. Take a look:

That being said, Ella herself seemed to be lacking something so I've added a few shadows to the design and I think it adds a kind of 'paper cut out' effect to her, and as I didn't intend for her to look overly 3D in nature, I feel it lends well to the model.

Adding colour and idle animation

Here's a very short post but I've managed to get my basic drawing of Ella into the computer and with a little tweaking and adding colour I'm a happy with what I've got so far:

She's wearing a night-gown/nightie/whatever-you-call-it, because the story starts with Ella painting/drawing while in bed and she falls asleep whilst doing so, she then dreams about being in the painting which is half complete (cue 'The Unfinished Swan') and so she has to finish the work she already started. Not worked out all the fine print but that's the idea I'm heading up!