In this post, I’m focusing on my start/loading screen for the game. The GIF features one of my three main characters; she’s a witch who transitions from a normal witch to a parasitic flower witch because I wanted to use her as an example of someone who got infected in the world of the game. I also wanted to focus on a young character who had many dreams and ambitions for her own future. People often try to undermine kids and their dreams, but that would be a mistake, as we’ve seen in hundreds of movies. I focused on a parasitic flower witch because she is a formidable enemy of another character (stay tuned).
The tools I used were Pinterest, Sketchbook, Inshot and Ezgif. I began by process sketching out ideas and in this phase, they are usually pretty messy, which is fine with me because I’m just trying to brainstorm and get ideas down. After brainstorming, I proceeded to flesh out the concepts, which resulted in my final images. Check out the evolution of my ideas below!
After looking on Pinterest for some inspiration, I found some retro typography that looked cool. Recreating that proved to be quite difficult though. for now, I decided to roll with a default font, just to get things rolling.
I wanted my GIF to be dynamic as it transitioned from a normal witch to a parasitic flower witch. Thus, I decided to animate the stars hanging from her staff and glitches. At first, it looked a bit choppy so I increased the speed at which the frames transitioned, but that made the rotation between the play, load, options, and exit a bit too fast. In the end, I decided to add extra frames that would slow down the rotation between those keys, but keep the speed of the swinging of the star.
Making this GIF was stressful and time-consuming, but I’m glad I had the experience because I haven’t animated anything in a long time and it pushed me outside of my comfort zone. I learned a little bit about GIFS and I’m satisfied with the result. Hope you enjoy!
