Archery attack animation for minions
Designing the left and right facing archery sprites was relatively simple. I just had to have the character's elbow progressively move back in each sprite frame, to show them drawing back the bow/ arrow progressively.
I drew a stick figure of the animation before hand, so that I would have a better idea of how much the character should move in each sprite / frame. I also physically practised archery movements, to get a better idea of how it would work.
The forward facing animation was considerably more challenging.
Originally, I had planned to have the bow perpendicular - so that it looked like the character was shooting our of the screen (see sketches below). However, I realised that when the character was facing forwards, they shot downwards toward the player. Therefore, it would make sense for the bow and arrow to be pointed downward toward them.
I looked at some inspiration images (See at bottom of the page) and noticed that sometimes archers would how and shoot their bows horizontally rather than vertically. So I re-drew the bow so that it went across their body (see sketches below).
In this bow position, the bow was directly in the centre of the player. Unfortunately, this meant that it was difficult to see the outline of the bow because the clothing of the player was so dark. The edges of the bow stuck out from the players silhouette, otherwise the bow was not very obvious / visible.
I decided that instead I would make position the bow to the side. Rather than shoot directly downwards, instead they could shoot slightly diagonally towards the right, so that the bow was more clear in their silhouette.
