ABOUT

Pancake Panic is a mobile game done in a week with Ali Maggs at Chaos Created. I designed the chef and backgrounds in Photoshop, and rigged and animated the chef in Spine. The game is being used to teach UK primary school pupils how to code as part of Chaos Creative game development coding workshops. The goal is to stack as many pancakes as you can before the time runs out. Clock and strawberry power-ups give time bonuses and score banking.

Animating the face expressions was done by swapping the heads, instead of Free Form Deformation, which requires defining 2D meshes and assigning weights. Spine is still rudimentary on that front. The other moving elements are done with puppet animation techniques. I only used FFD to make the pancakes wobble.

Painting the faces was done quite methodically, with only the main shape custom painted for each expression. I first defined a face shape as a solid gray, then used that as a mask for the light and shadow. The finished grayscale face was then colored using the Color blending mode to obtain the main colour and different hues. The main colour layer was kept visible, while the others had an inverted mask in which I only painted to reveal the areas I wanted. I experimented with different blending modes. Then I rearranged the separate face elements (nose, eyes, ears, eyebrows, etc) to suit the expression.