Hello! I spent the last week animating Hyper Bun Buster: Rocket Hammer Action’s penguin boss, and learning the hard way that rough animation is an important step in making character animations look good.

Where we last left off, the penguin boss’ attack pose was complete but I hadn’t drawn its startup pose yet. It was still using the regular penguin sprite as a placeholder:

I attempted to save some time by not sketching out a pose for the animation startup, and instead just moving around the existing boss character sprite into a similar pose to the one that the penguin is in. It resulted in one of the worst animation frames I have ever drawn:

This pose doesn't look great by itself, it doesn't convey a motion that makes sense, it has no personality whatsoever, and so on. Oops. So instead, I decided to actually do things properly and doodle out a pose that made for the motion and the personality that I wanted to communicate. Here’s what I went with:

Perfect! While I was at it, I doodled out a silly pose for her to make after she bonks into a wall:

And another silly pose for when she gets hit, inspired by the pose Reisen makes at the start of the flash music video for Overdrive by IOSYS. I'm generally not a fan of memes and references in games, but this really did feel like a good pose for someone to go into after they got hit by a cartoon hammer…

Once I cleaned everything up, the boss was complete! These same boss sprites are reused in the other penguin-themed boss fight in the ice stage, and you can see both of them here:

I’m pretty happy with how this ended up, especially considering that I don’t have much experience animating non-blob-shaped characters. Hopefully I’ll keep improving with experience!

Cat Cursor

I made the game’s cat enemy into a mouse cursor! I've grown far too attached to this cat after using it as an emote on my CassMakesGames Twitch channel, so when i saw that my friend NomnomNami had made cursors of characters from her games I had to give it a try myself.

You can get the cursor here on itch.io if you’re interested. It includes the .cur and .ani files used for Windows mouse cursors, the individual .png and .gif files for each cursor type if you want to try and use them on other operating systems, and the Aseprite project file that I used to create the cursor.

If you want to try making your own cursors in Aseprite, I used this Aseprite script to export it to .cur and .ani files. Other options include cursor.cc, AniTuner and RealWorld Cursor Editor. Good luck!

Anything else?

I've finally gotten around to playing Gravity Circuit, an indie game in the style of Mega Man Zero. I was looking forward to this game on release but it launched a week before Ducky's Delivery Service, so I was way too busy to be able to try it at the time. I adore its boss fights! I've only played a few of them but they're all wonderfully creative so far, with bosses electrifying metal panels on the floor, drilling through walls and dancing in and out of my melee range. Even if you're not interested in the game’s platforming stages it's well worth playing it just for the boss rush, assuming you can find a save file out there with it unlocked.

That’s all I’ve been up to recently, other than playing Final Fight. I’m going to think about strats for beating Rolento and Abigail. I hope you have an exciting couple of weeks and I’ll see you next time!