Animating by hand is HARD

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Took probably as long to do this as it did to get the game mechanics up and running. What programs do you guys use rather than Photoshop which isnt best suited to frame by frame animating?

Comments

  • edited
    The problem seems to be you're trying to animate too many pixels. Your legs look like quite wide where if you look at pixel art like The Gods are Watching you'll see at their legs are very thin and tapered.

    You're also doing anti-aliasing which a lot of games don't do for animated objects.

    From everything I've read and seen in tutorials, Photoshop is the right tool to use.
    Thanked by 1Nitrogen
  • Iy's not looking bad really, now get it in a cycle to better tell. Or at least better for us to tell :) There are some stray pixels I can see under his crotch and on his knee, and his collar disappears for a frame somewhere.

    But yeah if you wanna make a game, build a prototype, don't get stuck on animating. Go make a game :) Servicible is enough :)

    You CAN animate with a lot of pixels, but it obviously gets harder.

    The anti-aliasing vs hard blocks approach, again, comes down to experience. A lot of great animation has anti-aliased stuff, but you gotta know what you're doing and not just resize larger art into a smaller space. And there's a style choice too, though really non-solid pixel sprites are really a lot harder to get to.

    So yes, starting smaller, and solid definitely helps! I like to work within a 16x16 or 32x32 size.

    I use photoshop, I suspect most people do, though I'm sure dedicated things like Spriter would do a great job, but is an extra thing to learn and lack my familiarity with photoshop.
    Thanked by 1Nitrogen
  • yeah I don't think that looks bad either!
    I think I've posted a link to promotion before. I freekin love animating in it, it's so fast! I love it when the tools get out your way of creating.
  • Thanks for the feedback guys,

    I'll have a look at Promotion again, but it's good to hear that photoshop is the norm.
    Tuism said:

    But yeah if you wanna make a game, build a prototype, don't get stuck on animating. Go make a game :) Servicible is enough :)
    Exactly, this is good enough even with his neck disappearing and stray pixels everywhere, I've got the rest of the prototype to work on now.

  • For animating things like explosions and particle effects I use Graphics Gale (Free Version) as a starting point. It's got basic tools like onion skinning and layers, but the main reason I use it is because it's much faster than Photoshop when you're rapidly testing out ideas and seeing how the animate.

    Once I'm happy with how the animation looks, I export the images and load them into Photoshop where all the clean up and colouring is done.

    I also use Google Sketchup Make (Free Version) if it's a static shape like a coin or star that is rotating. I quickly model them in Sketchup and export the rotated frames to be used as reference in Photoshop.

    Spinning Star eg.
    image

    Link to Graphics Gale
    Link to Google Sketchup Make
    Thanked by 2Nitrogen Tuism
  • Sketchup is a great startup 3D program, it's what I used up until I needed to rig something. Bloody rigging GAH.
  • edited
    So I keep referring back to these "12 principles of animation", wonderfully illustrated in this short video whenever I think about animating something.

    I would suggest that adding some basic squash and stretch to the body of your character would help a ton, especially in making the walk follow more of an arc-like pattern as the head "bounces" a little. Secondary motion on the hat could work, you've already got some happening on the tie, which is neat. Anticipating the step movement by tilting the shoulders slightly beforehand might also help make the top half of the character feel less like a single piece. And finally, I agree that anti-aliasing makes the animation harder to pull off: A hard-edged pixel is a 100% here or there choice, it makes the movement more definite and easier to read.
  • @dislekcia Cool thanks! This is the sort of stuff I'll attempt on future projects. For now I've got the guard running around the level, and he looks *okay*, which is more than enough for my purposes.

  • @Nitrogen: I'm not good at animation in the slightest, but the last time I messed with this sort of stuff, I ended up not spending any time on the look of things and just obsessed over how they felt. I ended up having a couple of squares that totally felt like a bird for the Molyjam entry I was poking at. That was kinda mind-altering.
    Thanked by 2Nitrogen Elyaradine
  • @dislekcia That's cool! I'd rather have a box that *feels* like a bird than a beautifully rendered, photorealistic bird that feels like a lump of concrete.
  • That's an interesting thought... behavior versus definition... It reminded me of my old pet in Second life a couple of years ago.
    I made a pet called petbox...
    it was just a box.
    But it followed me like a pet.
    It rolled and banged into everything just like a box tumbling around...
    but it seemed loyal. Its behavior was dog-like... so it felt more like a pet/dog, even though it looked like a box.
    Thanked by 1Nitrogen
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