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Total Members Voted: 52

[Johuotar]

PTW

[DragonDePlatino]

On another hand, I also wonder how you are able to make a rotating gif...GIF creation always fascinated me. >_<

Hey, thanks for the compliment! As for making .GIFs, I use ASEprite for everything. It's a really intuitive program that lets you work with custom grid sizes, indexed palettes, layers and animation. I've used it for all of my pixel art for the past 2 years and it's never let me down. You can try out the older versions for free and buy the newest one for $10 if you'd like to support the developer.

And ASEprite works for things other than basic flashing between images...you can make the individual animations for a character and export them to sprite sheets to put them into your engine! (@cerapa you might want to look into this)

Spoiler: Animation Examples (click to show/hide)

(An explanation of this character in case anyone's curious.)


Forward Idle

Backward Idle

Forward Walk

Backward Walk

Forward Duck

Backward Duck

Forward Jump

Backward Jump

Forward Stance

Backward Stance

Punch

Thanks for the adivce!

Your welcome! ^_^ And like I said with GUNINANRUNIN, hue-shifting is easy to learn if you focus on it hard enough. As long as a color is sufficiently dark, you can use it as a substitute for black.

[cerapa]

Hey, thanks for the compliment! As for making .GIFs, I use ASEprite for everything. It's a really intuitive program that lets you work with custom grid sizes, indexed palettes, layers and animation. I've used it for all of my pixel art for the past 2 years and it's never let me down. You can try out the older versions for free and buy the newest one for $10 if you'd like to support the developer.

And ASEprite works for things other than basic flashing between images...you can make the individual animations for a character and export them to sprite sheets to put them into your engine! (@cerapa you might want to look into this)

I dislike the pixel art aesthetic of this because it makes the whole thing look cluttered.

But an export as spritesheet button.
Direct export to a gif.
An animation editor with all the layers instead of just the frames.
Right-click colour picker.

Fuck it. 10 bucks isn't that much in the grand scheme of things. Pretty sure I'm gonna use this more than *looks at steam library* most things I have bought.

[DragonDePlatino]

Heh. Nice to see I've gotten someone new into this excellent program.

By the way, if the pixel art aesthetic bugs you, it's kind of fixable. If you go to Sprite -> Prefernces -> General, you can actually change the screen scale to 1:1. The GUI and buttons will still be at a 2:1 scale, but the main file itself will be at 1:1 so you can preview what your sprites will look like at their smallest resolution.

Also, if you go to your ASEprite skins directory (C:\Program Files (x86)\Aseprite\data\skins\default) you can edit sheet.png to change the appearance of the buttons and colors.

[ShadowHammer]

Greetings pixel artists. I happen to have a request.
-snip-

I made a few sprite sheets for this, but I don't know if you'll want to use them. They're definitely a bit rough.
The basic guy with and without colour ramp (16x19):

I didn't animate the idle one, but I could if that would look better.
Walking (16x19, 180ms):


I should probably make this one a bit more intimidating. It looks like he's just out for a stroll. Bobbing up and down a bit might look better as well.
Attacking (22x19, 180ms):


A few of the frames are pretty blocky. I should fix that.
Taking damage (16x19, 180ms):


I threw a third frame of him standing idle into this .gif because it looks really bad with just the two damage frames looped over and over.
If you do want to use them, I can make the dying one and the differently oriented walking ones later today or possibly tomorrow. If you don't, that's completely cool too.

ASEprite looks like it would be waaayyy better than what I'm doing right now, certainly at least for animating. Another thing to add to my "after I'm done final exams" list!

[cerapa]

Haha, it's like a little clay man. It's kinda perfect in that way.
EDIT: Heh, apparently the file name agrees.

Spoiler: Don't go into the tall grass (click to show/hide)

Actually a bug where the hexes are a bit higher than they should be, but I think it looks cool.
Also zoomed in 2x.

The walk animation is really low-key though. Only really notice it when zoomed in. At the moment they are in a very busy background and kinda small, so it's hard to see their movement.

I do want to use them though. As far as directions are concerned, walking and idling only needs to be left/right.
Attacking might need all 6 though. They are all pretty far apart so the attacking animation might need the dude to take a few steps forward and/or upward(I don't think that punch animation quite reaches?). Attacking down though...will need some special logic. By which I mean a trivially addable variable which would shift the dude down when attacking downward. Kinda weird from an animator standpoint though.

So yeah. This is working as intended. Got me thinking about the actual limitations of my system and how to work around them. Draw the full animation set and I'll finalize attacks and then I'll send you the game so you can see them in action yourself too. Cute little buggers.

[ShadowHammer]

Awesome, glad you like it!

I made the walk into more of a run, with longer hopefully this works better:


That one is at 180ms for consistency with the rest, but it definitely looks better sped up a bit. Here's 120ms:

I don't know how the code's working, but if it's a hassle to have the animations run at different rates, I can fiddle with the others so they run well at 120ms as well.

The attack animation should reach (almost?) far enough for a sideways attack, but for up and down, you're right, it will have to take an extra step or two, and it would probably be best to make it look consistent, so it'll have to take a step on the sideways one, too. I'll see what I can do about that when I'm finishing up the rest of the stuff tomorrow. Sorry I couldn't get it done today, by the way.

[cerapa]

You said "today" at 7 AM for me. -5 GMT I presume?

As far as the code is concerned, It's trivial to have animations at different rates. And by trivial I mean I have to specifically match them up to get them going at same rate if I want to do that. Animations have a duration and the frames are evenly spaced within that duration. So if you give me a 6 frame animation and tell me to run it at 120ms/frame then I have to set the duration to 6*120=720ms.

That walk animation looks really good in action. Could you make a left-facing version of that?

You don't need to rush the attack animations, as attacks aren't fully coded yet. I need to fix up a piece of movement code that alternatively either cause two armies to fold into eachother, or to implode, before I finish attacks.

[ShadowHammer]

-7. I was up pretty late.

I changed the attack animation to throwing a chunk of dirt or something, at 48x48 and 120ms.
Down:


Sideways:


Up:


I hope I got the distances right.

Here's the dying one, 180ms, 20x19:



I'm not really certain what timing would look best for any of them, really, so you might want to mess with that a bit. Also, for the left-facing versions, can't they just be mirrored in-program? If not, I can flip them, but I've run out of pixel-arting time, probably for the rest of the day. I should really stop giving people time estimates, because I'm always wrong. Sorry again!

[cerapa]

Oh, I most certainly can do the flipping in the program. I just wanted to keep the possibility of non-flipped sprites for non-symmetrical dudes, so I need to write in the possibility for both flipped and non-flipped sprites being used for directions. And I need to check if the flipping actually works properly.

You seriously have nothing to apologize for. You finished this stuff before I needed it. Besides, you were the one doing the favour.

That's all for now though, until I get all the current stuff sorted. You were great help, so thank you. Can I contact you again if I need something else?

[ShadowHammer]

Alright, makes sense. I'll see when I can get that flipping done.

About the apologizing, I tend to do that way too much, probably because I'm pretty stereotypically Canadian. I apologize when other people walk into me.

Either way though, no problem, and sure! I'd be happy to help out some more; the game/battle system looks pretty cool (assuming it's the same one you showed with the pathing thing-y with in the RTYD/S/M/E thread?). I do have exams starting tomorrow and going for the next few days, but I should have lots of free time for the next few months after that.

EDIT: and here's the left-facing walk animation.

[evictedSaint]

Greetings pixel artists. I happen to have a request.
-snip-

This is all pretty neat. I don't have too much experience with micro-pixel work, so I might give it a try.

What's this game for?  Can you tell us any actual details about the game itself?

EDIT: Also, is there a preferred palette?  I imagine it could get pretty garish with a dozen different sprites with their own color palettes.

[cerapa]

The pixel art doesn't need to be that micro. I have support for multi-hex entities planned out. Actually, the next thing I would really need(after finishing attack animations, which should be quite trivial) is a bigger creature of some sort for testing purposes.


Anyway, game description...

The whole thing is heavily inspired by Dominions 4. I thought it would be cool to keep the general principle of really unique soldiers and have support for weird spells(every soldier currently actually has a quarter of a kilobyte of stats and traits and items and triggered effects, and that's with a blank dude, I kinda feel like I'm overdoing it). But I wanted to do it with proper animations and with a system that shows all the actions of a turn simultaneously. I also decided to go with hexes instead of tiles, because I like giving myself headaches.

Basically how gameplay goes is that you are leading a nation, you recruit units, march around armies, cast spells with your mages, forge magic items. But during battles you can't actually control anything. You can set general orders, and leave your mages with orders on which spells to cast for the first few turns, but outside of that, battles and their events are determined entirely by AI.

So yeah, this whole thing is entirely motivated by "I could totally do that better". My plans and systems differ fundamentally from those in Dom4 in several ways, but the end result should be vaguely similar.


There is no preferred palette. At least not yet. The only current sprites are the clay man, and my terrible grass texture. So if you want to make something consistent with the rest, make something that doesn't clash with the clay man. It would actually be pretty cool to have a nation made entirely of clay and wood and such, but the choice of whether and what you want to make is yours.


EDIT: ShadowHammer, you didn't link the correct spritesheets for the attacks. You linked the sideways attack instead of the down attack, and the down attack instead of the up attack. And the animation lies heavily to the left and up. I thought it was a problem on my end until I decided to check. Had to crop the bottom and expand the image to the left to recenter it, but it looks pretty good. The ball hits them square in the forehead.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[ShadowHammer]

Oops. How'd that happen? *scratches head* Oh well. Here's the missing one (should be attack up, right?)

[hops]

Mew mew



EDIT: Also can somebody give me tips on how to make realistic-looking animation in pixel art?