Theme 04 - Basic Animation
Theme 04 was divided into 5 ‘levels’. The goal was to create our own clickable game entirely from scratch. Every element and character must be illustrated, coded and implemented by myself. This is one of the themes where I feel like I had a very high learning curve. For example, I was introduced to javascript and did some exercises to master javascript. These 10 exercises really made me confident in using eventListeners, variables and functions but also in coding in general. Another major learning was my illustrator skills which highly improved during this theme.
I started in ‘level 1’ making a paper prototype of my idea of the game. This created a visual presentation of how I wanted the game to be. It also helped me with the placement of the elements, such as score, timer and health bar.
To create the asset list, I was introduced to several tasks to build up the character. I learned about different styles and implemented and created my own art style inspired by many styles for instant kawaii and baby bias. I did several exercises which included drawing in ‘hand on paper’ method but also illustrator exercises before starting the character creation on illustrator. All the assets were documented by a design documentation.
When it comes to coding, I learned to implement javascript animation and control the game with the tags ‘this’, ‘if’ and ‘if else’. Before including this to the coding, I made an Activity Diagram, which showed the path of what should happen when. This was a great recipe for coding, especially javascript coding. Lastly I used debugging whenever I experienced flaws in my coding. This was a hard yet great learning experience.