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Multimedia Production
Class 12: Game Polish

Topics

    • Locomotion Animation
    • Background Tiling
    • Sprite Sheets
    • Week 12 Game (polish) Lab

It’s Class 12 don’t leave!

Locomotion Animation

Character Animation:

Character animation is the most difficult form of animation. It requires believable physics like weight and acting that implies internal thought. Generally you can break down character movements into two categories:

  • Locomotion: Continues movement that involves whole body posing that generally changes the location of the character.
  • Acting: Pose to pose style with paused moments meant to represent word or thought.

Walk Cycle

contact
low
passing
high
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Run Cycle

contact
low
passing
high
contact
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Walk Animation Tutorial

Background Tiling

Background Tiling:

Many 2D games (especially old-school) utilize tiles for the environment. Tiles are simply a collection of graphics in one larger image file placed in a grid system. These can be used, and reused together to create platforms, obstacles, and other environment assets.

This will be useful in our platformer game to create a robust environment that is easy to manipulate.

The platforms are simply the same square graphic stuck next to each other

Sprite Sheets

Sprite Sheets:

Sprite sheets are a collection of graphics in one larger image representing each frame of an animation. This is superior to loading a new image for each frame in a game. This way the game loads one large image when it first loads then merely crops to only show one part of it during playback.

In Animate we do not use sprite sheets since all the data is held inside the program. However it does have a way to export out sprite sheets so that you may use them in other game engines such as Unity.

You can see all frames of the platformer player character in one larger image (sprite sheet)

To export a sprite sheet right-click on the animated symbol in the library and choose Export Sprite Sheet…

Week 12 Game (polish) Lab

Game (polish) Lab:

The platformer now has all the necessary elements in it and is playable. However it lacks polish. The graphics are just placeholders. In this lab we are going to create and apply our finished graphic assets as well and cleanup anything missing to make the project complete.

You will be graded on the following:
    • Background Graphics
      • Clean interesting platforms.
      • Sky is visually interesting but not distracting.
    • Other Graphics (points, enemies, etc.)
      • Well-crafted scoring elements
      • Detailed obvious enemies
    • Player Graphics
      • Excellent craftsmanship and interesting design
      • Simple animations completed.
    • Code Cleanup
      • Code is clean overall (formatted, no errors)
      • Bits of code are applied to operate graphics.
Resources:
Assignment Video Tutorials
You may watch the video tutorial below.
Assignment Lab Materials
Download the lab materials here: mm_week12_labMaterial

Assignment Video Tutorials

Wait! Before you go!

Did you remember to?

  • Read through this webpage
  • Watch the videos
  • Submit Week 12 Game (polish) Lab on Blackboard