Here is the ranged version of the flying enemy for the Train World. I wanted to add in a tech element that matched the world and give it a more armored feel so it will exist as more of a threat.
15 Frame idle animation - for when he is chilling.
Flying with intent.
Firing loop.
And a bonus 15m sketch. The prompts were for a vehicle with the tags "Loner" + "Prairie".
This was one of my first concept rounds at JB gaming - so lots of range trying to figure out the right mixture of scary and goofy.
We needed a generic flying enemy for Grave Danger's initial development. I started out a few months ago with a blob enemy covered in tentacles but didn't know enough about Spine to make it work. Here I am coming back to a more general purpose design with a bit more work under my belt and things are working out better.
I decided to animate the wings by hand and not with a rig due to the complexity of the perspective and animation, so started up drafting a few tests in Photoshop before drawing out the sprites and putting it all together in Spine.
Initial test.
Revision 2 with the body assets blocked in.
Blocked in the wings.
'Slow' 15 frame idle animation. The up and down strokes are held for a few frames and the tips of the wings are deformed with bones for a bit more organic look.
Here is the desert skin in the "Aggro" animation. The mouth can't open much larger than this at the moment.
Next stop will be to duplicate this project and create a ranged version with a projectile weapon below where the tenticals are.
Update: Removed the blur on the wings for now at the suggestion from a friend and I feel that it matches the game style much better than before. It was his opinion - and I agree - that the path blur I was using before looked more like a DoF effect and not like motion! Thanks, John!
Also tweaked the wing membrane color for the desert themed bat. Will hold final judgement for when he is in game.
And a bonus melee attack animation I forgot to export last time.
Finally got around to adding in Spine's really solid skin system and applying it to the default enemy rig.
Because the heads are all slightly different (and have different bones and animations) I had to kind of work around that by creating and attaching empty blank images to the skins for inactive heads. Im sure there is a better way but a brief search didn't reveal anything and we are on a deadline! This seems to work, but I'd love to know about other approaches.
The standard weakest 'train engineer' variant. Right now only the weapon, skin color, headgear and wrist strap are different, however if given the time I can make all the assets custom.
Maybe a bit too aggressive for the game, but will see if it grows on me. I think he is pretty badass regardless.
Next step is to create a "Caster" / "Shaman" version and add in some more general use animations.