2/19/23 - blog post 2

During the past two weeks, I have been working primarily on the thrusting and lunging melee enemy. I drafted several different sketches and ideas for both enemy types, and I decided what roles they would be on the ship - a deck hand and chef.

For the thrusting enemy, a new attack was added, which was a big sword swipe - this made me think of a huge meat cleaver or knife, so I implemented the chef concept in my sketches and sprite art. Based off the weapon type I thought of for this enemy, I gave the enemy a well developed and muscular upper body to support the type of attack they would make. Referring to the style guide that was created, I defined the lineart to be more bold and thicker on the outer edges so that it would be more visible, and tried to keep unnecessary details to a minimum for a simpler character design and easier identification.

For the lunging enemy, I am still currently discussing with the leads about the type of attack they have, as I wasn’t sure what type of lunging attack would be most suited to the work the programmers and designers had already done. I initially thought that the lunging attack was meant to be a “lunging with a dagger” type of movement rather than a “physically jumping/tackling the player”, so I may need to do some revising to the initial design. However, the general concept I thought of for the lunging enemy was a powder monkey or cabin boy. Since I was thinking of a younger aged boy for this enemy, I made the weapon a smaller dagger to match this concept.

I am currently working on finalizing the colors, and then I will be working on cutting the body parts so that they are ready for rigging and animating for the attacks. For the next two weeks, I will be seeing if there are any other enemies I can help with, as well as looking into the animating process for the current enemies. During the department/squad meetings, we talked about what kind of enemy the final boss could be, and we ended up deciding on a super large stationary enemy to make it more suspenseful and intimidating. We also talked about what kind of options we had for creating the attack animations - we talked about frame by frame animation as well as rigging in Unity, and we ultimately decided on trying a combination of both. Although I have created rigged animations using Live2D in the past, I am not as familiar with animating in Unity, so I will be looking to learn more about the process and how to create the attack animations for the enemy types I worked on! I am also planning to work on concept art for the final boss in the game, which I’m really excited about - it’s still in the beginning stages of conceptualization, but I look forward to sharing my ideas with everyone during the next meeting.

Sketching and drafting concepts (2 hours)

Converting concepts to sprite images, working on cutting parts to prepare for rigging/animating (6 hours - 4 hours for lining and coloring both enemies, and 2 hours working on cutting up each part to prepare for rigging)

Department/squad meetings and discussion (4 hours)