Inspiration
For my second Discovery Time, I wanted to take a look at creating another looping GIF; this time taking homage from one of my all-time favourite games, Half-Life.
Developed by game studios ‘Valve’ and originally released in 1998, Half-Life was a pioneering title in first-person shooters and laid the foundations for the games we see available today. With this in mind, I thought I’d tip my hat to some of the original characters and immortalise them in a GIF.
The Style
Now I knew what I wanted to make; I needed to pick a style. A while back, I found the following examples that really caught my eye. I really loved the simple block colours and lines but felt it would be great to add a little roughness to the textures.
The Characters
To make life as easy as possible, I had to make sure that each character was made from an identical base model. This meant I could transition between each face smoothly, without the movement becoming too jumpy for the viewer.
The Final Result
To really offset the characters, I also wanted them to sit on a colour that best represented their backstories.
Gordon was the main character, so giving him the colour of his orange suit seemed appropriate. Next up we had G-Man who was a dark and mysterious character, as well as Barney, the security guard, always shown in his blue fatigues. Finally, the game was littered with enemy soldiers, so camo green was the obvious choice here.
