Designing the Hippo.

The first thing I had to do when it came to designing the hippo was the decision to make him stand up on two feet, or on all fours. Me and Chris in the end just decided that it looked a lot cuter on all fours so we kept with that idea.

As for the design, I just started to sketch out some ideas for a four leg hippo, but the hardest part of this would be making the animation. I've done some minor animation in photoshop before but nothing serious and complicated, making a sprite walk or run would be the hardest thing I've done animation wise on photoshop.

These were my initial sketches with a four frame walk animation. To aid in the leg animation I searched a lot of four leg animation reels, such as dogs and wolves etc. They all had very similar movement to what I wanted so I could successfully mimic the movements and incorporate them into my design.

This is how the walk animation in the sketch phase ended up looking like - I was actually very pleased with the animation as a whole and now the only thing for me to do with the hippo was just polish him up and colour him correctly.

All in all the animation for the legs was definitely the hardest part for me to do, here is a quick insight of my technique to how I did this, I'm not sure if this was optimal but this was the first thing I thought of and I just decided to go with it.

THE METHOD

In Photoshop the method I did for animation was basically drawing the legs on each frame, on a separate layer, and then in the animation palette, on each frame I would hide or show the appropriate layers for each corresponding frame. 

In the layer palette it looked something like this -

Layer's 22 and 23 were just an addition to the leg animation so that it would be a little more advanced, they are the layers for his bottom and head moving up and down.

If I were to do this animation again the only thing I would change in my process of this would be the amount of frames in the entire animation, I stuck to four to be safe as this was my first proper 2D sprite animation, but after doing it once, I realised I could've made it a lot cleaner and smoother if I added another 2 or 3 frames just for a little extra detail in the movement.

Introducing HippoBUFF!

This project we've been asked to make a 2D game, much like the previous project, in groups too, just a different game engine and 2D assets instead of 3D.
The engine we'll be using is Construct, it's a rather simple engine but it's capabilities are almost limitless - unfortunately we've only had the free version to work with, the biggest downfall with the free version is the limit on events we can have, which means we'll have to decide what's more important to include in the game.

My role as an artist will be to create 2D assets for the game. We have three artists, Conor will be doing the background work, Jamie the on screen assets such as platforms etc, and finally I'll be doing the character work, which includes animations for them too.

Our ideas initially were just that we wanted something that really didn't make much sense and was just silly. So rather quickly we decided on a hippo main character and worked around the idea of having a hippo as the main character rather than focusing on what the game will actually be. Making it a platform game was the safest thing for us to do as this is our first adventure into 2D Games.
After some discussion we concluded that we would want this hippo to be in a nightmare land fighting off his childhood friends.

This is the moodboard I put together quickly just to get an idea of what type of animals and what sort of art style we could potentially go for.