Harry Allinson created characters first to establish the base for his pixel game. He struggled initially to come up with ideas but planning helped him brainstorm more efficiently. He created backgrounds with trees, clouds and hills/mountains and added the characters. This allowed him to see where the game was going. He then animated the game, being careful to not have too many or too few frames. Animation brought the game to life. He added effects like zoom transitions, color correction, motion blur, 8-bit music and sound effects to make the pixel game more interesting and vibrant.

1. Production Reflection
Harry Allinson

2. Process
Firstly, I designed my characters for my pixel game as my base for the whole game
because I thought that creating the characters first would be a good thing to start with.
At the start of this journey, it was a struggle to think what I was going to do so I started
to plan so that I could start to brain storm more efficiently and thus come up with a
greater idea for the pixel game that I was going to create. After creating my characters
with the pen tool, I proceeded to create the background for my game...

3. Process
When viewing my process of my background, I can clearly see that I was well made
since it had all the basic features that a background for the style that I was going for
had like the trees, clouds and hills/mountains. Although I sample and distort the clouds,
from another background, I thought that it was quite a good back ground overall.

4. Process
After making the first background, I made another background that was more
complex and also put the characters that I had made into the game. From this
stage my game I could see where I was going to go with this game since I had
everything I needed on the map. All I needed to do now was animated and
add effects to formulate a pixel game that looked as aesthetically pleasing as I
could possibly make it.

5. Process
When animating the game, it was important that didn't do too many frames so that it
took up too much time and also I didn't want to do too little so that it looked cranky
and unprofessional. In terms of my game, this is really where my game started to feel
alive and functional. Overall this took quite a lot of time since I have to render
out two parts of my game and animate them which was worth it in the end so I didn't
mind taking up the time since the game ended up very well.

6. Process
The main things that I did from the animation in after effects was adding a smooth zoom
transition between each part of the game using scale and the graph, color correct
(curves, contrast, brightness, sharpen and saturation/vibrance), motion blur to make the
whole game look better and smoother, 8-bit music that made the game feel like a game,
sound effects (explosions and gun shots) and blood splatter on both the screen when
shot at and the enemy when he gets shot at.
Overall, I think that the effects that I added to the game were very good because they
made the pixel game much more interesting and better, since it looked much more dull
when just animated opposed to the finished to the piece hence the colors were more
vibrant and the motion blur made the game feel smoother.