This is the portfolio for the video game project that me and my friends started in our Digital Media class. we aimed to create a 2d fighting game similar to something like Super Smash Bros or Brawlhalla. we split up our workload and each worked on a separate part of our game, I was mainly working on crating sprites and animating them as well as the menu system. As for software, we used a website called Pixilart to create animations and Unity, with an extension called Plastic SCM that allowed us to share work easily.

We wanted to make our game novel, so we decided that we should create our own animations and characters. We started by quickly character ideas on our own and then reconvened as a group to discuss which ones were better. As for the games style, we decided that there wasn't going to be one. More specifically, the style was that nothing matched, the characters have no correlation to each other; there's a medieval knight, a scientist with a samurai sword, and an astronaut with a toxic gun.

One trick that I learned while animating is to add a colored background to the character, especially with white colored characters. In the example above, the scientists labcoat blends into the empty space, but with the lime background it clearly defines what is part of the character and what is behind them.

layers are also an essential part to the animating process. Splitting the parts of your characters into layers reduces the drawing time by allowing you to only edit the the layers that you need. it also kelps when there are multiple layers of the character overlapping each other.

One of the biggest challenges about this project was working productively together. This was not too big of a deal for most of the project as most of my time was spent on animations (mostly an individual role). However, in the later stages of the project, we had trouble combining our effort on a singular task while also staying productive. This was amplified as we were also under stress of the impending deadline. Some ways that helped us to work together were to have five minute team meetings to talk to one another about what we were working on. 

another part of the project that I was tasked with completing was the menu system. specifically we needed the menu to be able to record data when different buttons were pushed, record that data and move it between scenes and utilize the data to edit certain parts of a scene. My solution was to create an object called a scene traveler that would travel across the menu scenes and collect the information on which buttons were being presses. the scene traveler was also able to be reference4d easily as it was a definite object that wouldn't be destroyed and was always in the current scene.