Do you ever want to be able to create monster characters and have some fun? You may have secretly longed to experiment with them, separating their heads, bodies, and legs, and then getting really creative with your character designs.
You should have. This class will teach you how to code your own animated monster characters using the open-sourced Wick Editor games and animation tool – wickeditor.com and the mobile illustration iPad app Affinity designer.
After playing the popular mix and match card games for children, I was inspired to create this class. I thought it was necessary to be able to do this digitally with software or an app that automatically jumbles all the picture parts and create an animated monster gif or web game.
I love to look at image ideas on websites such as Pinterest first. There are many types of monster characters and games. It gives me an idea of how to assemble my designs and put them together so they can be used in The Wick Editor to create an animated game.
You'll learn how to use Javascript coding in The Wick Editor to create randomly generated animated GIFs from your six monster characters. These will be created externally in the Affinity Designer app for your iPad.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to even get started on a character. So I will show you how I make a monster using Affinity Designer. I then challenge myself to use only that triangle to create a character. This is a great alternative for sketching out lots of ideas. I prefer to work digitally and experiment with many ideas on my iPad using the amazing range of creative apps available.
Learning to code can often seem very difficult. But with just ten lines Javascript code, you will be able to make your monster characters appear randomly at regular intervals and change each and every time you export it as an animated GIF.
You can then use the same code to create a template with different creatures designs and illustrations. Or, you could use mixed-up photos from family and friends to create funny animated gifs. As you can see, I used a combination Superhero, Alien, and Robot character designs to create animated gifs.
Affinity Designer has a wide variety of powerful drawing tools that can be used to create fun monster characters and illustrations. Because it's vector-based, your designs are easily scaled without losing quality. Simple shapes can also be easily manipulated and joined together. You can create your monster characters anywhere because this app is available on your iPad!
Affinity Designer also has amazing export capabilities. This allows you to easily transform your six monster designs into individual sliced heads, bodies, and legs. These parts can then be imported and used in The Wick Editor to create animated gifs.
The Wick Editor is similar to Adobe Animate. It has a familiar interface with interactive features such as a frame-based timeline, Clips (similar to Animate’s movie clips and graphics symbols), interactive buttons, and a variety of vector drawing shapes and brush creation tools.
You don't need any prior knowledge to use The Wick Editor.
The Wick Editor has its own drawing and brush tools. You can create an animation or game entirely within it, using its layers and other helpful functions like tweens! It is also an open-source tool. This means that you can contribute new features and learn how to make or code things. The community and creators will be happy to assist you.
After creating your monster character from sliced-up pictures, you will learn how to import them into The Wick Editor and use them as animated Clips. Then, you'll learn how to use them in order to create and code a monster randomiser animation that can then be exported as an animated GIF. Let's get started, and have fun!
