With my sword fish swimming animation taken care of, I had to produce a second animation which would serve as its death animation. I had the luxury of using the already created concept art by Evelina Paulsson from which to animate. This time I had to create my own drawing and animate that.
With this basic line art done I could sample the original color of the swimming sword fish and then fill in this version. With some clean up and using the 2px line thickness guideline Evelina and I chose, I finished off the design. Because this is a “dead” fish and the game is cartoony, I added a tongue hanging out.
The previous animation was fairly easy to create. It was simple to distort and redraw the tail as needed to get a swimming effect. With this one, however, it was not as simple. I tried a couple of different ways to animate this version but it just wasn’t working for me. This fish has just been shot and is violently resisting passing into the next fishy world. This means that the whole body had to move in some way. I decided that the only way for me to animate this was to chop it into pieces and work with them in a puzzle fashion.
Now my plan was to position the pieces in their respective positions and then connect them accordingly by painting over layers. Because we went with line art for the art style I couldn’t easily connect and move while hiding layers. It didn’t cause too much extra pain but in the future we could work differntly to try it out another way.
For each frame I positioned and rotated the various segments to achieve the desired effect. After they were all in their correct positions, I painted on top of each under layer to hide the gaps or lines. Once this was completed for the five frames I was creating it ended up looking like this:
The last step, once again, was to add the lighting and shadows to each frame of the animation. I made the top part, which is facing up and towards the light, be the lit side. I added the shadows, in turn, to the underside or the part facing away from the top/light. As the top of this laying fish has a pelvic fin I wanted to have it cast a shadow across the belly and possibly get it to move with the motion of the body. And the final product turned out like this:
It was a good result in the end and once we put it into Unity it will tie into the swimming animation.
Selfish 2D Shooter 
You make it clear from the start what you were planning to do, in addition to giving a step by step description of your design process and decisions. This gives the reader a clear idea of how you did the animation. Although, it could have been useful as a reader to know what different ways of animating the swordfish did not work and why. This would explain why you decided split the swordfish into 10 parts, and move the different parts around to animate the fish rather than going with another animation approach. Ultimately, this would give the reader a better understanding of your design process, and the decisions you made, in addition to what you were going for with the death animation.
It was nice to see the actual design process step by step through pictures, this gives an overall understanding of what you did. In addition to giving me an idea of how I could animate different game assets in the future, in a quicker, more efficient way that would end up looking like a more natural transition from one frame to the next.
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