Week 2, Month 1

Second week of the challenge and I've made some minor advances in both art and design. For the first I've managed to finesse the run animation and iterate on it several times. For the first I completed a rough so that I could implement it into the game engine for testing purposes.

This piece of animation is mostly to check for timing, what I found was that with a scrolling background the animation actually works and different speeds. It just makes the background look further away if he's going faster. This is a happy mistake to stumble upon as I hope to implement a mechanic in the game where speed increase the longer he runs and this means that if I can work out how to increase the animation speed within the engine it'll be a cinch.

This is the screengrab from that placeholder animation the game ground still needs to be created but the trees and mountains scrolling in the background are working ok. There is still an issue with a gap in the scrolling background that shows the seams of the loops. I'm going to work around this in a few ways. First I will separate the sky from the mountains so that I can hide the mountain seams behind the trees. Second I will cut the trees so the there is a gap anyway and i wont be so noticeable. Thirdly another layer of trees will be in front of those that are currently in place and will be sparse anyway.

Although hard to see the screenshot also show the character jumping, which was easy enough but I will add a specific jump animation sequence to the action to help it look smoother.

Lastly I have done a clean up version of the run animation with colour to test for resolution dependance, I added a face to the bear to give him a bit of personality as it was really bugging me that he looked like a generic run animation.

I feel like there is room to improve the personality side of this character through animation by giving him a few more secondary actions. I am considering adding a backpack that would bounce and get some dust kicking off the end of the steps. My research in to endless runners has given me a good sense of the details that you can get away with using characters that will fit on an iphone. The animation will also play quite fast so I need to keep it simple.

The next week will be finishing art assets for 'Picinic Goodies' and obstacles and the implementing collision system to the game as well as scoring. After that I hope to get start on the 'Drop Bear' aspect of the game that will involve swiping and scene transitions.