Frog – Animations

This week I have worked on animating the frog enemy that I drew a couple of weeks ago. As of now, it is meant to be stationary, but I might have to make an animation of it rotating in place in the future, if that decision changes.

I have made one idle animation, as well as two versions of an attack animation, both in Photoshop. The idle animation is pretty simple, with the only movement being the eyes and the vocal sac inflating and deflating. I wanted to add movement to the frog’s forelegs, but it looked way to choppy so I scrapped that idea. I believe that it would look a lot better if I divided the frog into clip-art and used an animation program like Spriter2D, but I’m not sure how I would make the rest of the animation function, like the movement of the eyelids and pupils. It’s possible that it would work fine, I just haven’t had the time to experiment a lot.

I made the idle animation by making a layer for each frame and then drawing the changes I wanted. It was a pretty straight-forward process that ended up fairly well.

The two attack animations are of the frog using it’s tongue to try to catch the player. In the first one I made, I simply created a bunch of tongues in different states of extension using the lasso tool and the free transformation function, all on separate layers. Then I just made the correct one visible in the right order.

I made the second one because of the constructive criticism I got from another member of my group. He noted the distortion of the tongue’s shape due to the scaling differences between the frames, and suggested that I made another one where it remained the same size throughout the animation. I did so, although the process of making this one was a lot less streamlined than that of the first.

First, I had to divide the tongue in separate parts, to then build it up again throughout the frames of the animation. But I quickly ran into a snag. After finishing the first two frames, I moved the tip of the tongue up a bit, so that I could add the first part of the long, main body of the tongue. But I realized, that if I moved a part of the tongue in one frame, I moved it on all frames. So to solve this, I had to make multiple copies of every part of the tongue, merge the ones that would be together and then place them into the right position in each frame.

I’m probably not doing a very good job of explaining this right now, but since I procrastinated writing this post until the last minute, it’s kind of late and I’m tired. So sorry about that.

Anyways, I got the animation finished, but I realized that I actually liked the old one better, since it has a more “rubbery” feel to it, and it looks like it’s actually extending. The tongue in the second one, where the tip stays the same size, I feel wouldn’t fit in the frog’s mouth at all. We’ll see what the rest of the group thinks as well as which one looks best in Unity.

I’m pretty satisfied with the tongue itself, as well. I wanted it to look kind of gross, so I made it veiny and added some warts or blisters on the tip. They could also be wasp-stings, since we plan on making the frog able to eat the “Hunter”-enemy, which I talked about in a previous post.

I’m a little worried that especially the idle-animation won’t be visible in the game, since it is very dark. I suggested that it would be cool if we could make the eyes of the frog glow, to make it more visible and cool, but this idea was not particularly well-received, since glowing eyes would give away the frog’s position in the dark. I feel that this would add a modicum of fairness, though, since it will be a bit frustrating for the player to be killed by an almost invisible enemy. It’s one thing with the wasp, but this thing attacks at range, so it will likely be outside of the player’s field of vision.

Man, this got long-winded. Please comment below which attack animation you think is best, the rubbery one, or the stiffer one?