My main task for this week has been to create and animate a sprite, in this case the main character for the game my team Amarok is creating. I have started out by making several different drafts and rough animations during the previous weeks, but this week I set out to properly finish the sprite, and undoubtedly this has been the most time consuming artifact I’ve been working on this week. I made two animations for the sprite: an idle/movement animation as well as an attack animation. I drew the sprite and animated it in Photoshop, and created the sprite sheet in Sprite Sheet Packer.
I chose to animate the sprite frame by frame. I did this, not only because I’m familiar with the process, but also because long, flowing materials such as the character’s dress and hair are difficult to animate using other techniques. I wanted to give the feeling of how light the hair and the dress actually are by making them flow and flap in the wind, and to make this look the most natural I had to animate it frame by frame. The option would have been to make a clip doll animation, but using one drawing of the hair for example cut into pieces would make it look stiff and less light and flowing.
All in all it became 7 frames for both animations. I re-used my idle animation for the attack animation. The difference I added was the character’s arm pushing forward towards the lantern as well as the lantern lighting upp with a fiery glow.
I had to make some changes to the attack animation. First off, I animated the character pushing her arm straight forward to fire the projectile from her palm using magic. This, however, was scrapped quickly since the player will be able to fire projectiles in any direction using the mouse. It would look off and weird if the character looks like she’s firing straight forward, but the projectile goes backwards instead. To make this work, I moved her arm a bit towards the lantern and added a glow animation to it to make it look like she’s charging it up with magic. The projectiles will then be fired from the lantern instead of the character itself.
These are the two sprite animations I made:
This is the finalized sprite sheet, containing frames from both of the animations presented above (not in order):
Elina Marjomaa 
I think you have done a good job on this assignment. You clearly describe what you have done, how you have done it and why you have done it. You have used a good way of partitioning the text with an introduction describing what you have done and how in a general way, continuing with a paragraph with a more detailed description on how with a good explanation on why you choose the technique you did, and then another paragraph where you further develop the thoughts behind what you have done.
I think our post is valuable since it gives a good description of how you have thought and done when you have created this sprite, and also clearly explained why you used frame by frame animation instead of clip-doll to get the light flowing feeling of the dress and hair which might be of use for others considering the same thing.
The images you have used in the end completes your post, showing the result of what you have described above.
GillaGilla