Changes to Jamie

 The biggest change to Jamie is that we needed to have a front facing Jamie. Previously Jenny had just used the side head on a front body which looked very weird. I showed her how to use the ruler function  so that everything would be the same size when she made it.

The end result was that Jamie looked and was the same size as her side version. I used the same process as the other characters to bring her into Flash and create a new idle animation. In this state I decided that her torso would just move up and down and her arms would move slightly in and out of her sides. This is to create the impression that she is breathing heavily, since she would probably have just stopped running. It also makes her look like she is ready to jump back into action at any time.

One of the things we also decided to do was introduce blinking into Jamie's states. I decided I would first add it to her jumping animation, as when she jumps it would make sense that she would close her eyes, similarly to how little kids do when they jump big distances. Its an instinctive act that people have when they feel like they might get hurt. It also makes her look like she is trying her hardest to move from platform to platform and save the animals.

When I started to make Jamies blink I made a top and bottom eyelid. I put them into flash and then animated them to start from nothing, jump up and create a whole circle then recede to where they were prior. When creating fluid animations I would use Classic Motion Tweens which fills in the gaps between keyframes with smoother animations. The result when applying this to Jamie was that you could see the eyelids rising up to touch. The effect was that it looked like she had been punched in the face, even when the eye was fully closed. It was very scary and removed the child playfulness that we had worked hard to accomplish with Jamie. 

In my second attempt at getting Jamie to blink I used the same texture as whats in her eye but in photoshop I made it a slightly darker shade and added a purple tint. This made it more consistent from open to close and the effect was less scary. 

 I played around with how to make the blink appear, including having the whole blink state tween in from the bottom of the eye, but I found that this was too slow. I solved the issue by removing the tween, I played the animation to test it and the blink had one frame which appeared then dissapeared. It appeared so quickly that it looked like a real blink.

The next problem I had to solve was making her states the same size. The three states were all different sizes which meant the transitions from one to the other within the game were very obvious and glitchy. To solve this problem I opened three frames from the different states and put them next to each other in photoshop. From there I decided on which ones needed to be resized. Some also needed to be cropped down to size. Since there were multiple frames it was going to take a while so I used the actions function and created a recording of the correct sizes and cropping for the frame. When I played this on the other frame it would apply the same settings. It made the resizing process much faster.

From there I decided on which ones needed to be resized. Some also needed to be cropped down to size. Since there were multiple frames it was going to take a while so I used the actions function and created a recording of the correct sizes and cropping for the frame. When I played this on the other frame it would apply the same settings. It made the resizing process much faster. All the frames were between 100 and 200 pixels and were in the center of the images. This meant that the transition in game went smoother and unnoticeable.