POP! Goes the Forest Spirit

So here is our "hit/hurt" sequence:

It's drastic but it makes it clear that you've been hit, which is important if the game has intense pacing. The re-spawn is rapid though, allowing players to return to the action quickly. The simplified version would be for the one-off event where the player is struck for the last time with no energy left in the boss fight:

I also did a basic animation for the start game text for the main menu to test what it would look like:

I will need to see it against the actual menu to gauge whether or not it is fluctuating in opacity too rapidly.

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-drop the Boss!

Bwhaaah! Bwhaah! Di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di whump whump! And that's the closest I've been to dubstep for a long time now, and yet I'm totally okay with that.

This has to be played at 10 milliseconds per frame to look realistic so it is definitely the smoothest animation in the game. I may remove some frames to shrink the image just for Stencyl's sake if it's too intense.
I also put more sparks into the saw animations and a sweet flickering drop-glow so liven it up a bit. The "attack swing" anitmatino of the spider happens so fast that the sparks are only visible for 0.1 of a second but what it does add makes a difference.

I'll add a shadow underneath it next but in the meantime I had a go at coding to take a load of Andrew. Here is the basic experimentation with getting a key-oriented menu screen.

As far as I'm aware this works fine. It is very basic and doesn't do anything but shift between scenes based of the position of the cursor (soul) on the screen in predetermined places. The preference of this method of input over a mouse gets the players used to using the keys to navigate right off the bat.

Gettin' Shady

I don't even want to know how many frames are in this one, but each now has a little shadow;

My goals over the next couple of days is to get the boss drop-in animation to scale, add some more sparks to the saw sprites, do a hurt sequence for Voodude and put some shadows under the saws :I

Swing Batta Batta

Here are the basic attack sequences for the spider. This gives him something to do that will keep the players cautious.

I added some blur frames to the boss' drop in sequence so when he appears he can be scaled as though he is flying past the camera.

We did try this in Stencyl however, and it didn't quite work with the scaling code so I'll have to animate a shrinking fall animation separately. Ah well. Something to keep me busy for the two week faff...

Just So... Angry

And we have ourselves an anger cycle;

If we do things Crash Bandicoot style and have it that you have to evade his attacks in three stages, each stage could be marked by playing this sequence. It may pay to figure out a way to make his glow more red each time so the player knows they are making some form of progress.
Today Chris and I tested the animations to see if they looked just as good when the sprites are shrunk to half the size when saved from photoshop and scaled in Stencyl. Our aim was to make it so Stencyl could handle importing them easier, and so far they look pretty good. Whether or not this will translate to the projector screens as smoothly is yet to be tested.

Suddenly... Spiders

Hopefully when this happens the kids will be like "oh snap". What do you call a steampunk spider anyway? A "stunker"? "Spunker" just sounds dirty.
Anyway, here is the laugh loop;

This can be used as a taunt between attack cycles and after his drop-in animation.

The Spider Goes "Buzz"

Here are the most recent sprites I've managed to crank out. The saw is broken into three parts, the middle section being a loop-able set so that the saw can take out a lane for as long as desired.

Saw grind loop

Saw lower

Saw retract

I've also managed to do the drop-in animation for when the boss appears. The initial blur is for him coming in from offscreen. We hope to have the screen shake when he lands to add to the atmosphere.

I plan on having an "anger" animation that plays throughout the fight as you defeat him. I'll probably need to do a death animation as well.