Jordan Pasek
Project 2: Aero
My Aero project is my attempt to make a cheeky little 50s diner scene with zombies. Originally the scope for my project was much larger and included drawing all of the scenery in 32 bit, but time constraints made me scale back to just the zombies. I did my drawing/ animating in photoshop. I learned how to draw pixelart and scale that art up and how to make a basic gif in PS. I was having issues with the Old-Man2.gif zombie animation playing (possibly an Aero bug), but felt that the motion animation somewhat made up for it. My earlier attempts at animation had the zombies utilizing the “aim” function to constantly face the camera sort of like what Doom did with its 2D sprites, thereby disguising their 2Dnesss. I quickly realized this would not create anything that looked good from above or below, with no way to restrict the view of the observer it had to be scrapped. I also experimented with having the zombies follow the camera, which didn’t work because I had no way to tie them to the ground, so they ended up either below the floor or in the sky. I even tried to create a shooter by moving discs that spawn at the camera location to the tapped zombie while simultaneously making the zombie disappear. Unfortunately, Aero decided to bug out with that, so it was also not meant to be. Aero in its current form is simply too limited to create anything more than barebones animation, but I’d love to see a program with that intuitive UI that would also be able to handle more complex sequences.