My exhaustingly detailed Post-Production PowerPoint for the Video Game project.

1. Production Reflection
Joe Duffy

2. Process
The first part of the project I made was the
overworld. I decided to do things differently to other
pixel art animations I had done before by completing
all layers on a single page rather than add parts on
each separate slide of animation. This was effective
although if I wanted to add slides in between parts it
would create a domino effect in that I would have to
change the parts that had been jumped on by the
new slide. However the creation of the landscape
was the fastest part of the project, only taking
slightly over a day’s worth. I began with the lava and
the the wall to fill the perspectives of the screen.
The path came next so I knew where the details
should be put on the three layers without blocking
parts off. Once I had made the more atmospheric
details like the lava bubbles, torches, gems and
dragon skeleton, I had to duplicate theses segments
so I could change something slightly about them to
produce a more lively area. The music for this area
was fairly difficult to make as I wanted an ominous
feeling while having more flowing parts instead of
purely repeating the same part. When using the
website Beep Box I discovered that putting the beat
of two layers on the same one, it created a more
alert sound which associate with the scarier location.

3. Process
The characters took three days to complete.
Yeah, this part of the project was far more
time inducing than I ever foresaw. I knew I
wanted three characters, all with unique looks
and abilities. I had even drawn the characters
so I would have a far clearer idea of what I
would make in Photoshop. However, while
making the details somewhat clear was tough
enough I had to make three separate layers of
most, if not all of their features from hair to
toes. This ate into my time a lot and
unfortunately due to the speed of their
movement it is quite difficult to see all their
motion anyway. I had to measure their size
comparatively to the land and each other and
began with the face, progressing down the
body. Depending on the size of the part, I
would either create an entirely new layer and
duplicate and add and take away parts of the
segment.

4. Process
The next part of the project was also pretty tedious
but had it’s nicer moments. I gave each character
voice lines when interacting with the environment to
give more personality to each that the sprites could
show. I did enjoy created the profile pictures for
each character, making two different expressions for
each piece of text to make them look like they were
talking. The text on the other hand was painful to
produce and put into the slides. As I wanted to have
the text scroll across the page, I had to put each
letter on a separate layer and make hundreds of
slides to to add each one. I also had to change the
face on each 5 slides and account for spaces
between words. The process was terribly long and so
the letters are far from precise because I would still
be doing them if I chose to make each the exact
same size. I have been told that Premiere has a
better tool for this but I didn’t want to risk so much
time figuring out something I had never done
before. To complement the text I recorded my own
voice and used a tool in Garage Band to make each
piece of audio sound more pixelated to fit the video
game aesthetic. While I think the end result worked
well, I would have liked to have made the audio and
visuals have a little more timing but I could only see
the tempo if I made it into a video as Photoshop
didn’t run particularly fluent for me to accurately go
with.

5. Process
As the previous two parts of production took such a
long time, I was seriously thinking off dropping the
battle sequence completely as there was no way I
was going to complete all the animations for moves
etc. I decided that I would at least show the layout of
the fight with fairly minimal movement. I began with
the background which I chose to complete as a
complete layer instead of separately and with no
movement in it’s state as opposed to the overworld.
This was so that I could have more focus on the
characters movement and it kept the scene simple to
look at. I decided to keep key features from the
previous scene including the gems, cracked ground
and obviously the skeleton adding a small amount of
extra details as they were bigger to work with. I had
to make sure the size of floor was enough for the
character to be placed without having to be too
small or be hardly visible. The music for the battle
has a far more energised tempo than the cave music,
having a build up that connects from the overworld
into the battle, giving the parts a closer connections.

6. Process
I made the animation of the characters jumping into battle first so that I could get the
most difficult part out of the way. I had to make all the parts on the same layer so I could
see if the size of the character was consistently sized and place each model so that their
parts didn’t disrupt each other. The centre character, Arywnn, had a couple more slides
of movement as she was was the first character created so I spent a little more time on
her. I fixed this by having the others come out a little later which worked canonically as
Arwynn is the leader. I put as much detail into them as I realistically could, with their face
taking a hit in this department. As I had done with the heroes, I had done multiple
version of the Hydragon’s design on paper and used only a single layer for each of it’s
body parts, except its wings, the opposite of the overworld characters. However this idea
actually gave the monster a lot of movement as I only had to move the legs, heads and
tail with the arrow keys in between slides as moved into frame, with the wings going up
and down. I added the Health Bars and Annihilation Attack Bar to make the scene seem a
lot more like a Video Game battle, adding a growing effect to HP and AA sliding in. I even
added a white outline around the character models to portray the player selecting who
will go into fight. I created sound effects for the Hydragon, having three roars for it’s
three heads and a final one from them all, and a beep for the selecting of a different
character. The sound get’s deeper as you go lower on the character list to provide a
deeper level of sound design. As the characters motions are meant to fast paced, this led
the scene to be very short comparative to the dialogue heavy counterpart which means
the part in over pretty quickly which is slightly annoying but I did what I could. I had to
stay much later, with my Thursday going from 9am to 6pm, so I could do as much as I
could. I even attempted to finish the production during the weekend but the computers
were not available and on Monday, I could access the Premiere file as the computer I
was using didn’t have all the assets that the video had. I add parts of the animation in
when I cold couldn’t finish the whole thing until Tuesday where I have finally finished!!!