Weekly devlog #18 - Player redesign

Hi everyone! This week I have been working on resizing the player to be 2x3 blocks, and also some new blocks that I will reveal in a later devlog.

Redesigning the character
Once I have all of the animations ready, it would be very hard to make any changes to the character design. So I took some time to play around with the player proportions and the look of the player. Nudity warning!

The final design that I chose was the one in the bottom right.

New animations
One very important thing about animating is that you plan out your animations. You don't want to be spending a lot of time adding detail to a character, just to find out that the final animation looks bad!

So I started animating the character with plain colors, just to see if the movement looks correct. One mistake that I made the last time I was animating the character is that I never checked how the animations looked like inside the game before I added the details. That's why the old walking animation doesn't match the actual player speed. This time I am testing these animations inside the game itself to see if it fits:

Not only did I reanimate the character to be 2x3, but I also added death and jumping animations. I have also reduced the number of frames for the running and attack animations. Previously all of the animations in the game were running at 20fps, but now they are running at 12fps (also called animated on two's). This is so it takes less time for me to add new clothing items to the game.

Running animation

Death animation

Attack animation

Jumping animation (frame depends on if the player is going up or down)

I have also resized most of the blocks already:

That's it for this week! Let me know what you think of these animations. Hopefully I will have the actual player animations ready next week, and maybe even a few clothing items.