Hello again! this week I have been working on our games final boss, Gunilla!
Everyone in my group have been discussing a lot about our last boss. What she should look like and how we want her to appear in game. Starting out, we wanted Gunilla to have every element in her appearance, having fire, water and wood all around her. Our lead programmer also came with the idea to have her looking a tree soaked in water that was burning. We scratched both of these ideas and kept thinking of ideas during the whole project so far. Eventually we came up with an idea that actually worked out for everyone. With the new design, Gunilla now looked like a really big, sad looking lost soul, with a mask very similar to the main characters.
This design was very good and easier to make, since our usual animator decided that me and our other graphics artist, Fishy, to make the animations for Gunilla. With this task given to me, I decided that I wanted to work on the mask, while Fishy got the job to work on the flames (body) of the boss. The problem with this task is that I have never worked with animating facial expressions before, and it is known to be quite difficult.
I had to make four different animations for Gunilla. Idle, attack, element switch and death, each of these having different expressions for the boss. I started out sketching the mask with a basic expression and going from there. We wanted the boss to have a tormented expression, constantly looking sad, this was hard to animate because I had to make four different ones, and not making them all look exactly the same.
after many hours, I managed to actually make rough animations for the boss. I was really happy with the result of my work, and all that remains on the this artifact is to refine it and add colour to it. She is also going to have ghostly flames behind her, acting like a body. This however, is my teammate fishy’s work and we will cooperate to make them fit together.
Not much time remains on the project, and there are a lot of things left to be done. Everyone in group 12 are working lots to make our game become reality. And hopefully our hard work will pay off in the end.
Next week I will aim to finish the boss animations and colours! so look forward to that.
Cheers!
Reactorpanda 
Hello, Alex!
As I thought that your game was one of the best looking games at the beta I have been quite excited to see the progress of the project. Though, to be honest, I would have loved to see you making the game art in the style of your placeholder background; I am a sucker for raw looking art work.
Moving on. I love the fact that your boss is called Gunilla. I think the game industry could learn something from you; bosses do not always have to have complicated names that only a few can pronounce.
Gunilla sort of reminds me of the “Phanto” enemy in “Super Mario Bros 2.” A mask floating around, I am quite positive it appears in some Zelda games too. Anyways; I understand why you scrapped the other ideas for her appearance, though I think you could incorporate some of these ideas into the final design like maybe cage in the flames with tree branches and maybe have water streaming out of her backend (don’t take that out of context.) Just some ideas of mine, take them or leave them.
The facial expression animations look good so far and I really like the death animation. The elemental switch animation, though, looks a bit odd in my opinion. It looks to me like she thinks it is painful to switch between elements. Maybe that is what you were aiming, I don’t know, but I like to point it out.
Keep up the good work.
Cheese out!