The first Enemy you will face in our game, is the unit known only as ‘the Warrior’. He is your basic melee attacker, and will walk up to you and try to strike you down.
Since all our enemies are supposed to be bugs, we did not have too many different options to chose for the warrior role. In the end, it came down to either a moth, due to their habit of eating clothes, or a wasp, due to their habit of taking hostile actions towards people. We decided to save the moth for later, wanting to give it a role of higher importance, as the moths play a far greater part in destroying clothes, which is the main plot here.
When designing a wasp character, you have to think about what a characterizes a wasp, like big butt, pointy and striped. In this case however, were making a 20s cartoon wasp, which means a wasp that made sense would not make any sense at all, in fact, I decided to turn the whole design around to compliment the gangster theme. I went for a ‘goon’ type of character, reducing the volume of the butt significantly, and increased the size of the upper body instead. I dropped the skipped the rubber hose limbs for the arms and went for a muscular Popeye style instead. I finished off by giving him a traditional 20-30s cap to make him appear more human.
Since the warrior had a lot of muscles, I decided that the best way bring this character to life was to use squash and stretch techniques. When I animated the attack animation, I muscles in the arms follow through, squashing a slight moment after the hand reach its final destination, resulting in a more satisfying impact, as well as a somewhat shaky movement which indicates a soft and rubbery aspect to the characters body.
Unlike during the making of my first animation, I did not change the direction I was going in or faced any major problematic obstacles during the production of this animation. However, the end result turned out a tad too slow. It also appeared a bit rigid. Thankfully Sky was able to fix that without any problems.
The final result was good enough in my opinion. However, this was quite an easy task compared to what comes next (and what came before, for that matter), so I should not let this accomplishment go to my head just yet.
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