Space Shooter Dev. 4

This is undoubtedly the worst Thursday of the year. Thursdays have a tendency to be Slightly Worse than other days of the week in my opinion, by no fault of their own but because Friday brings deadlines early in the day. So Fridays are really at fault, but you feel the pain of the deadline on the day before it, so Thursday takes all the blame, and Fridays get credit for being the best day of the week. It’s unfair, really. This is only tangentially related to the artifact I’m writing about this week, I just felt like venting.

The artifact of the week is, in fact, an animated elevator. A scrapped animated elevator, a now outdated animated elevator or to put it simply: work down the drain. Still, the methods and choices stand true for the new version I’m in the middle of creating so it’s not completely meaningless.

In our version of the Fancy Mansion concept, the player drops off their ill-begotten goods in a handy old elevator which they send down to their accomplice for pickup. The elevator’s probably the most modern thing in the entire mansion, and thus undoubtedly viewed with great disdain by Mr. von Fancy.

It’s still very old though, so instead of nice smooth metal with proper doors, I started looking up references of the old kinds of elevator – you know, metal gates, creaky, the kind of thing a young child would be hesitant to ride in. Then I made an interpretation and painted/drew the thing. My version required significantly less detail than the original, on account of size.

For once, I decided not to live dangerously and actually paid proper attention to what layers everything was on, for the sake of the next part of the process.

Which is, of course. Normally this will be the cause of great agony during the process followed by great satisfaction at its conclusion, because it’s just sincerely cool to see something you’ve drawn move about. But an elevator with sliding metal gates and a sedate descent into darkness isn’t very difficult to animate. I just moved a few pre-existing bits horizontally on each frame, copy-pasted even, and then grabbed the entire interior of the elevator and gradually moved it down on the image to simulate descent.

While I have tried out the video layer timeline animation system for Photoshop, I prefer the regular layers and frames deal. This might very well be because I haven’t really given the video layers proper consideration and effort into learning it. However, there’s a time for learning and there’s a time for doing and these last weeks have largely consisted of the latter (there is some incredible fake wisdom going down in this post).

It turned out fairly nice, I thought, so I’m a bit sad I’ll be making a different version. The reason I’ll be doing so, as well as remaking a lot of other art, is because the style of the environment didn’t exactly fit with the style of the characters. I’ve been feeling like this a very long time. When I started this post I’d half a mind to write about the importance of trusting your aesthetic doubts even in the face of encouragement from your peers, but that’s not strictly speaking an artifact so I guess I’ll have to leave it for a different post.

It’s exactly the same lesson I thought I learned from remaking the walls.