Screens

Apart from jamie, the biggest animation I faced was doing the screens. The screens are used in between our playable game levels. We decided it would be best if they were animated, giving our game another element that would appeal to children. Jenny made several assets that would be used in the screens and she designed their basic layouts. It was a similar process to the creation of the characters except on a bigger scale. The biggest amount of things was the leaves. Originally I was asked to animate all the leaves on the screen separately so they would move like trees in real life.

 However there were hundreds of leaves needed to make the trees. I decided I would make leave bunches and animate those. I still had 107 layers in the screens flash file. Each of these layers contained an asset that would be used in a screen. I tried to organise them as best I could using the lock, hide layer and folders function. I was also concious of the frame rate as I didn't want the game to crash because of the frames in the animation.

The screen layout for each screen as about the same, with the background texture, the trees on the side and the bush at the bottom the same. I animated all of these first, so that I could use the flash file as a base for the other screens. In this one I used the leave bunches on the trees, there are 2 on the left and three on the right. I also animated each section of the bush, there are three big bushes, 3 small bushes, 3 flax bushes, 2 leaf branches and 2 filler bushes. Once these were animated it made it easier to create the rest of the screens.

The first screen I made was testing out the placement of the main headings and introducing the animals. I animated the animal head to be peaking out from their respective bushes, however after testing these I found that it was far too much animation for one screen and made the screen look too busy and overcrowded. The headings on the wood looked really great and it was a theme we would continue for most headings and buttons. I also left a gap at the bottom of the screen, this is so that the buttons could be put in when the screen was put into Stencyl. I talked to Lucas about it and that was the prefered method for creating screens. 

Other screens required animation to draw attention to specific things. For example the poacher screen required that the poacher and the dart be mobile. This was so it drew the child players attention. In screens such as the one below I also put in the information that was not a button, such as the massive beware sign and the text warning the child that the poacher was now active in the game. I animated the poacher dart from one side of the screen to the other flying under the text to further draw the attention of the player. 

The hardest screen I animated was a "loading/waiting" screen. We had the idea that leaves would rush onto the screen and then rush back off and then the new level/screen would be loaded. It was a unique way of progressing to each section and would also be a point of difference between our game and other games. It meant that I needed to animate the leaves seperatly. I used the leaf bunches and made upwards of 20 layers of these leaf bunches. They were off screen for the first frame, by frame 5 they were part way to covering the screen, like below. By frame 10 they were completely covering the screen and then worked their way out by frame 20. The complexity came with making sure each leaf bunch covered its own portion of the screen, moved in its own way and when put with the other leaves all the screen was covered. I managed to do this however it was the longest most time consuming screen. I am incredibly proud of it. 

More examples of screens I made:

In some screens it was necessary to remove part of the tree on the right. This was because there was more information that needed to be said than there was room to say it.

By the time I was finished I had made 15 screens, including a 'blank tree screen' which was just the trees and bush animation with nothing on it incase we needed a blank screen or just a screen with a button.