Here's a mockup of the death animation from the Toxic Sonic game. I made three separate sprites -- the blood explosion, the two bones popping out, and the skull popping out and shattering -- and then the programmer arranged them on the zombies so that the the blood explosion always plays (sometimes in two or three positions on the same zombie) and there's a 1/3 chance the bones will pop out and a 1/3 chance the skull will pop out, so you always see different configurations of these three sprites for each zombie you kill. There's a 1 in 9 chance you'll get all three at the same time and it actually kind of feels like a little bonus, like getting the flaming fist on Ken's uppercut in whatever version of Street Fighter they introduced that (I think there was a 1 in 4 chance of that happening in that first version, and they made it his normal attack in later versions). This was fun to animate! It looks a little better in the actual game because it plays much faster, and the zombie can fade to 50% opacity when he blinks in and out; for PixelJoint I just set him up to blink darker for a few frames and it's not as cool an effect. Anyway, I'm finally almost done with this project! |
