FBF Animation Assignment

For flash class, we had to create a short animation, choosing any character of our choice, and have the character interact in some sort of way . The character I chose was one of my favorite video game characters as child, the blue bomber, Megaman. I got the idea from chatting with friends, deciding what to base the assignment on, and somehow his name came up.

I decided to use the classic Megaman design from the first his appearance in a video game, Megaman 1 for the Nintendo Entertainment System. I chose to put him in the Bombmans level, as it was the one of the only ones where I did not have to animate him jumping, which would have been tricky to pull off. Although I did have to extrapolate for one extra sprite for the animation where he shoots his mega buster at the enemies. At first it was tricky, but eventually I picked out certain legs from and arms from the different sprites in the original reference cycle, and successfully created an extra sprite of animation.

Overall, the project wasn't too hard. Creating the ground and the background objects was not a big challenge, and neither was creating the enemies. Although dressing the armor was difficult, as the shape of his boots made some of the sprites uneven in height, but other then that, the project went fairly smoothly.

It its difficult to say how long it took me to do it, because I stretched the time out during a two span. For the first week I spent roughly around 1-3 hours a day creating all the assets. And in the last week I finished the animation in one day, in about 4-5 hours.

From this assignment I've learned that a lot of time and care is needed for this delicate art, as one small mistake of judgement can screw up the presentation of the entire finished product. I feel more confident in my abilities in Adobe Flash then I have prior to this assignment.

Here are a couple of screenshots taken during the creation process.



The enemies were taken from the Bombman stage. The first enemy, a stationary turret that pops up when Megaman comes close. The second enemy was a missile shaped like a shark, that hovered above the air and swerved up and down.

This is the sprite that I had to create. It took me a while to figure out how I would create this sprite, as I almost abandoned the idea of using Megaman as the concept for the aniamtion, but eventually I was able to take certain body parts from the oter sprites and It worked out. This is the stance where Megaman uses his Mega Buster. 

This is the tracings over top he original run cycle animation. 

Here I had to put his clothes on, it got a bit tricky as the boots caused a small inconsistency in the height between frames. 

 This is a tracing of one of the background assets, a massive ball on a thin stem. It sort of reminds of the Death Star from Star Wars the way it is designed.

Flash Running Assignment

For this assignment, we had to create a running animation. I chose my favourite video game character Sonic The Hedgehog, and put him in his most infamous level, Greenhill Zone. This on average took me 3 days of work to complete, and at times was very frustrating. It's not that it was difficult or that a lot of problems came up, it's just very time consuming and requires a lot of time management in order to get it all done. Overall, I have learned much from this first assignment and I know feel more confident in my abilities in Adobe Flash, then I did before.

Here are some screen shots:

I made the running cycle by taking a an original from the internet and tracing it over. I created all the assists and accessories added on afterwards, such as the shoes and gloves

I then made a replica foreground similar to the first level in the first Sonic The Hedgehog game. 

And finally, I put everything into flash and volia, the finished product.