In 2012 I began working with an Indie game dev team on a personal project, a game inspired by Shinto mythology called 'Kodama'. Kodama himself is a tree spirit who's power changes depending on his environment - how dried out or waterlogged he becomes affects his appearance and abilities. The levels are puzzles that require the player to use Kodamas changing powers to progress, as well as defeating various Yokai (Monsters), also based on the Yokai of Japanese folk tales, like the tree-dwelling Kijimunaa and the revolting, fleshy Nupeppo.
This project has been bubbling away in the background for a couple of years as the game has changed and developed. Initially, all of the character animation was to be done on Flash as the game would use spritesheets. However later in, we elected to switch to a bone-toll based software called Spine so that the animations were more responsive to player input. I've included GIFS below of all the sprite sheet animation as I'm very proud of this early work. Each action was animated frame- by - frame in Flash, exported as a spritesheet of lineart, then painstakingly painted up in ArtRage to achieve the loose, watercolour look of the final animations, which was consistent with the 'traditional' approach to the rest of the game visuals.
Kodama character design and development
Enemy character designs and character development
In this layout you can really see the gradual change of Kodama's colour, mass and vitality as he goes from dangerously dry, through perfect health, to dangerously waterlogged. In addition to some changes in weight and speed, the power of some of Kodama's moves would change depending on how dry or wet he was. For example, Kodama could float on air currents, but in a very dry state he would be blown about all over the place due to being light and flimsy, and when waterlogged he would very quickly fall back to the ground as he is too heavy to float properly. The player would need to use the different properties of certain 'states' to progress through the levels - taking on lots of water to smash through a floor surface, for example, and then losing the water again to be light enough to float over a ravine.
