November 2025

“No GenAI was used in the preparation, planning or creation of this work. [AIAS Level 1]”

GIF made with Ezgif.com

25/11/2025

I began work on the project. I made a mood board using PureRef and began making renders that would serve as a base to trace over to help with perspective.

Mood Board:

The purpose of this task was to collect images related to the Victorian era and images of video games that are similar to ours. This is to have references for when we develop the art for the game.

I obtained the images for the mood board from Google images.

The mood board isn't very large, and I wasn't able to find many diverse images to help as a reference; but I think this mood board will get the job done. I think it portrays a good Victorian mood, but it doesn't really feel the way I imagine our game to feel.

When I do this again in the future I may need to visit other websites such as Pinterest to try and find images that portray the feeling of the game better, and then have a separate PureRef file that serves as a references. I did initially intend to have two files, but with the lack of Victorian images on Google I wasn't able to accumulate enough imagery to create a more refined mood board as a seperate file.

Ground Animation:

The purpose of this task was to create an animation of the moving ground that would help the artist with moving/ animated perspectives.

As references I looked at the streets that were on my mood board, and I found an image of a Victorian lamp post on Google that I later added to the mood board.

I think this is a successful block-out, it is simple but but effective in my opinion. I made sure to make it fairly easy for the artist to trace over; I did this by adding a checker material to the ground to help show the movement of the flat surface, and I made the animation 24 frames long to not overwhelm them with work.

First I moved the camera to a top-down position and set the framerate to 24fps. Then I scaled the plane to fill the camera, added loop cuts, scaled the new edges to the sides, and extruded the faces at the sides upwards for pavements and a road. Then I got an 8 sided cylinder, set the origin point to the base, made it tall and thin with a wider base, added a cube at the top, shaped it to resemble a lamp, and joined the cube to the cylinder. I initially had four lamp posts in the corners, but I thought that was excessive so I kept it at two. (The lamp posts were duplicated with Alt + D as opposed to Shift + D to create instances which speed up renders). After that I added a simple checker material the the ground and parented the lamp posts to it. Next I duplicated the ground with the lights to extend the road for the animation; then I parented the new ground to the original ground. I then set up the light with a global sun. I then realised that there is a lack of shadow on the right to symbolise buildings, so I added two planes on either side and parented them to the ground. Next I went to animating the ground which was two simple keyframes, after which I changed the animation curve to linear to stop slow-downs and speed-ups in the animation. And finally I rendered the animation as a collection of .PNGs in a folder.

Cycling Animation:

The purpose of this project was to create an animation that could be traced over and to get accurate perspectives.

I used the penny-farthing images from the mood board to help me with the shape of the bicycle.

I personally think that the outcome was successful. The animation is a little jagged due to the animation being done with linear curves, but I think the movement is quite nice in the 24 frames. The spokes are really wide, but that's because I just assigned an invisible material to alternating faces of a poked face.

Making the penny-farthing took some heavy thinking to find a way of making the shape relatively accurate, but to overcome that I just had to continue deforming the shapes until they started to make sense. I initially wanted to create a block person and then add a rig, but I got a little lost so I made the rig first and then moved the blocks to the rig; It came out a little wobbly, definitely not up to the industry standard of quality. But it works. First I animated the penny-farthing to lean and spin, and then I moved on to animate the rig, matching it as best as possible to the pedals and handlebars (since I don't want to learn inverse kinematics). While doing that I also decided to give the body some movement; I also made the body move forwards and backwards slightly to give it some more movement. Later I found a "Shadow Catcher" setting which made the plane disappear but continue catching shadows; which was exactly what I was looking for. To make the spokes I initially tried to make a material that would cause stripes to go into the middle, but I wasn't able to figure it out so I just applied the material to alternating faces and made it invisible.

In the future if I need to make a character, I will make sure to make the model first and then apply the rig as that will be more accurate.

Animation with no head bobbing.

Animation with head bobbing.

Kick animation combined with cycle animation.

26/11/2025

Kick right:

The purpose of this task was to create an animation that would be traced for the kicking animation.

I looked at an image of a motorbike man kicking in my mood board for somewhat of a reference.

This one was more complex, and so I am not as satisfied with the result as the idle cycling animation. It's almost as if the framerates change halfway through, because the first half of the animation was one tilt and the second half had an overcorrection tilt which forced the penny-farthing to speed up. It's not a smooth as the cycling, but I am quite happy with how I managed to emphasise the kick with more movement. The arms also wobble on the handlebars too much. It's an animation for an action, it's only going to be played after a button press; so it should look good regardless.

I overcame the difficulties primarily by tweaking things until I was fairly happy with it. To make the kick more powerful looking I made the kick itself shorter than the time it takes to get it into position. I also made everything lean more rapidly and further as the kick is happening to emphasise the power more. And to make the balance recovery more natural I used the remaining 12 frames to make it slightly overcorrect before returning to the original position. But putting more movement into less frames made the animation more jagged, so I tried to smooth it out by moving the head in the opposite position; which seemed to work. And of course during all this movement I made the body lean more to emphasise the motion.

In the future I might consider not limiting myself to a set number of frames, but for this project I'll keep the 24 frame limit to keep things consistent.

27/11/2025

Kick left:

The purpose of this task was to make a mirror animation of the right kick.

It's about as successful as the right kick.

It was fairly simple to make, I just mirrored the armature and body pieces on the global X axis, inverted the tilting of the penny-farthing, and made the legs fit the pedals.

If this were a 3D game, I wouldn't have been able to do this technique because I'm sure that game engines would freak out if an armature inverted.

Player fall:

The purpose of this task was to create an animation that would play instead of the player sprite when the player loses.

For a bit of a reference I looked at a GIF of someone falling off a penny-farthing for guidance.

The animation is a little wobbly and unclear, but falling off a bicycle is a violent action. I think this achieves the impression of falling.

It was really quite difficult to get looking right; I basically had to restart half of it when I realised that the penny-farthing fell to the ground rather gently. To begin with I found that the root of the body and leg bones weren't connected; I looked to google for answers, but it turned out that I fixed the issue before I started troubleshooting (parented the leg bones to the body bone.). Then it was just moving and tweaking things until it looked right, making sure that the limbs would move similarly to a real human being's in this situation. I also made sure to give the body and bicycle a bit of a bounce to emphasise the impact.

The limbs definitely don't look right when they are stretched out. I should have done a T-pose model first, rigged it, and then duplicate and use it.

28/11/2025

I made the one-page pitch by adding a filtered information dump, adding some of the assets that I have made, and drawing a concept art by tracing a frame of the animations and composing a little scene. The ground is a little too dark making it look like it's night time, but overall it seems to convey some of the ideas.

Mount:

The purpose of this task was to create an animation that would play when you start the game; an animation of the player getting on the penny-farthing.

For reference I looked at the GIF of the guy falling off a penny-farthing to see how he gets on.

There's a little bit of a jolt in the middle of the animation, but that's probably from the little jump. Overall it should work for an animation that plays once every run. I didn't run into any major difficulties; I've become more experienced with animating.

02/12/2025

Victoria Running:

The purpose of this task was to create a running animation for if we add Queen Victoria who will chase you on foot and will be seen if you move too slowly.

For reference I looked at a GIF of what seems to be Rocky running with a crowd, to see how much the body moves when people run; which turns out not a lot.

It was quite difficult to get the arm and leg movements right, because they would seem more like kicking or flicking and wouldn't look like they were contributing to any forward movement. But the end result is satisfactory in my opinion.

Maybe in the future I should look at how it is done in Mixamo. Maybe I should have started with obtaining a Mixamo model/ rig, and used it instead.

03/12/2025

Granny Fall:

The purpose of this task was to create an animation for the Granny character for when she falls.

I think the outcome of this animation was fairly successful. It was fairly simple to animate compared to other animations, and I am pretty pleased with the flip.

I first started by animating the bicycle, since that has caused me to reanimate a large chunk before, and then I animated the flip.

Drunk Fall:

The purpose of this task was to create the falling animation for the Drunk Sailor character.

It is a very simple animation, but I think it works. Maybe there's not enough bounce in the penny-farthing, but I think it's fine.

My thought behind this animation was that drunk people have a slower reaction time, so the animation should incorporate that. And so I took the cycling animation and modified it to fall with any reaction only happening around halfway through the animation. I also added a little arm movement at the end to add a little visual interest and motion to the end.

04/12/2025

Tourist Fall:

The purpose of this task was to create a falling animation for the Tourist character.

This is one of the lesser interesting animations, and it's not really all that well animated. I should have parented the leg bones to the body bones and then had the character come detached from the seat; but I have grown a little tired of animating and don't want to re-animate half of it, even if it won't take too long.

I started by duplicating the normal cycling scene, and then I re-animated it so that the character falls over the front. One thing that I changed after rendering the frames was making the wheel continue spinning, because in real life if you fell over while riding at speed you would continue moving and so the free wheel would keep rotating.

05/12/2025

Drunk Cycling:

I thought it could be nice to have a separate cycling animation that enhances the drunk character.

It turned out fairly nice, but the forwards and backwards motion is a little snappy.

I took the normal cycling animation and animated it to have more exaggerated movements.

09/12/2025 (Minecraft Mounts of Mayhem release day)

Sound Effects:

The purpose of this task was to create some sound effects that could bring more immersion to the game.

It's hard for me to know if a sound effect is good until I see it in the game. But it definitely won't be triple-A standard.

First I downloaded free sound effects off of Piaxabay, then I started placing them into the Blender video editor, cutting them up, and arranging them until they resembled the image sequence in auditory form.

In the future I should take screenshots of what I am doing during the process, not at the end.

12/12/2025

I helped fix code.

I fixed the falling animation code after it broke after a fix. And I fixed the kicking animation/ box spawning code too.

It was primarily adding conditions that create sort of "gates" that control when code runs in a loop.

I also rebuilt the spawning system to be able to spawn more than one opponent at random times using alarms and random variables. There is also code that should in theory make the opponents spawn more frequently when the score is higher.

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