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Since the scenes have been updated, it has felt like the world could use more action to bring it to life. I have wanted to dome animations for a long time and I finally got the chance to focus on them. I am not well versed in animating, so many of the final outcomes took tutorials, time and practise to get right. Have a look!
Firstly, the radio needs an animated radar to flicker as though the signal is fluctuating. For the time being, I animated just one flicker to show to the player that the radio is functioning. All of my animations were done in Procreate.
This animation was completed before the John Hansard Gallery, as shown in the clip below.
This animation is simple, but it adds character to the design. The purpose is to illustrate when a new message comes in, accompanied by a sound of radio static.
For my first animation, this was simple and easy to make. I believe if I stick to non complex shapes, I could make more relatively efficiently.
In the future, there would be different styles of frequencies and sounds to make the radio feel life like. What would be ideal is if the radar makes a shape for the when the code input is incorrect, and for a different shape for when it is correct.
I chose these colours because they represent an oscilloscope, which is a device used to measure frequencies and show their wavelength. As the radar is inspired by my research on oscilloscopes, I designed them to be recognisable to our target audience. Not only do they stand out, but they fit nicely with the overall scheme of the world.
It is a given that any media in the mystery genre uses rain at some point to capture the theme. Since our game is based in a stormy ocean, it makes sense that the world outside is at a constant downpour.
When I first thought about animating rain, I planned that it would be easy to draw lines stretching down the page quickly to act as raindrops. However, I found out that doing this manually takes a long time and ultimately does not look very good. I decided then to find some help online.
I made a brush with a single stroke of a light pencil so that I could draw the rain repeatedly without worry. The rain can be adjusted to any size, opacity, and colour, which is perfect for any scene I want. I could use this brush for some other projects too, in the future.
With this, I made a simple rain animation by using the brush across the screen in random positions for each frame. This makes it appear as though it is moving.
With some blurring, the rain looks as though it has some depth and distance to it, perfect for an outside-window look. The background is transparent, so I can overlay it in the Unity project.