Ben Makes 'Em Walk

It actually wasn't the most productive of weeks, but last week...well that's a different story.  Continuing off of my post from last Tuesday, I'm working on a game.  Most notably, it takes place in a city.  A city with pedestrians that go about there daily lives and stroll up and down the street until there's danger.  They flee from danger, they get hurt, and they need rescuing.

The multiple "States" that each civilian will go through.

The city wouldn't be very interesting if every single person that lived there looked the same.  So I started thinking about variations I could make to give the crowds more life.

Some quick sketches. Trying to get some different features to help each civilian stand out.

Knowing that each of these tiny, helpless civilians will possibly be placed in one of these states and that each one of those states needs to be animated puts such a strain on my mind that it makes the whole thing feel like its not worth it.  Luckily, there are corners that can be cut and things that can be streamlined.  Rather than animate each character doing each movement, I've decided to animate one male character and one female character in Adobe Flash and edit those to add variety.  Change a few facial features, hair styles, swap the color pallet and you've built a some semblance of a real town.

The character's individual parts before assembly.

I build a base character by breaking up his individual body parts and constructing them in Flash.  The parts will be animated via a skeleton.  That way, I can redraw the specific parts and have all of my animations pre-arranged for me.

Character pieces are assembled and attached to a virtual armature.

The character is animated and its frames are exported from the program.  Those frames are shrunken and their pallets limited to fit with the aesthetic of the game.  Plus, as any good artist will tell you, every piece of art looks better shrunk.  It hides all of your mistakes.

He is very determined.

I'm currently working on all of the other animations.  In time, I'm hoping to have a (virtually) living and (virtually) breathing city for players to run and fly around in.  He's citizen one.  Soon he'll be one of many.  For more updates, feel free to visit my personal blog: www.NeedYourDisease.com

-Ben

@NeedYourDisease