slynyrd

Thyrian Defenders - 68

Added 2020-10-23 14:22:16 +0000 UTC

Hey, space jockeys! This week I worked on spicing up the title animation. A simple fade would have sufficed, but we don't do anything the easy way with this game. It all happens real quick, but it was quite a bit of work to make the letters build in like this. I broke down the dimensional planes of each letter into separate layers so I could animate them forming frame by frame. I animated each letter and additional elements into separate frame animations in Photoshop. Then, I imported all the gif files into After Effects so I could easily control the timing of everything. I tried several iterations, playing with the sequence of the letters building in from left to right and such. However, everything felt too slow unless they all built up at once. So in the end, nearly 300 layers are involved in a sequence that is only a couple seconds, but I think the result is effective. It's subtle, functional, and is more conceptual than a simple fade.

This will only play the the first time the menu appears when you boot up the game to preserve snappy functionality when jumping between menus. In the second video you can see how the menu animates on with the current fade in of the title. Now, we just have to combine the menu with the build up animation. Think I need to add some reflections that streak across the title as well. Anyway, that's the concept at the moment. Like most things in this project, we may end up scrapping it and coming up with something even better.