Hey y'all,

Hope you had a good X-mas and upcoming New Year!

Last month was super busy for me. It really picked up at my day job + I did a lot of LevelUp UK stuff. I've been running around the country to involve myself in a series of game jams known as #SeasonOfJams . It was a really cool month. But, it does mean I did less work on OverGem.

Still, work I did.

Continuing where we left off, I finished recolouring the Shield Maiden to give her a more icy look. As seen in the alpha, each character will be associated with an 'elemental attribute', and I made 'ice' the element of our northern warrior.

I also fixed the running animation in response to feedback.

The hair around the head, and the head itself, is hopefully less static now.

In addition, we now have an attack animation! Being a noob pixel artist, I researched how to animate a good attack. I followed the advice given here and drew up my first draft:

The only difference to the advice in the link is the anticipation, as technically I am drawing 2 motions there (jump and anticipate).

I got feedback on my draft that the movement needs more exaggeration. So, I made the jump a tad bit higher and the leg kick back a bit more:

When I put this into the game, however, I found that I was using too many frames! This does make for a nice gif with smoother animation. But, it also made the attack feel clunky, out of sync and slow.

I had to cut from 10 frames down to 5 frames to make it feel snappy. I kept only the 5 key frames and ended up with this:

That’s all I got this time! See you next month!