lodger

support for something like this would be *Brilliant*- dynamic pixel based lighting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TenM5s7YWzA

depending, this may be best done with an animated texture that can be tiled.

hey all I'd like to put together a dev team to make some 90's style arcade games. I'm a musician, sound designer, and beginning artist (~1 year or so in concept art and sprite art). I'd like to take my skills to the next level and want to work with others to put together some ideas. PLease see attached some examples of my art and music. please feel free to message me or contact me at i.am.ron.the.lodger@gmail.com Previously i have contributed music to dev company Team Fistpuncher on Washington's Wig (level 3 theme). Arcade Style Space Shooter Track http://youtu.be/p5_v_ef8guA Sample Based Hiphop Track http://youtu.be/QwuoJcr5Peo -Lodger

thanks- this is helpful.

hi, I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations or techniques for how to go about animating/building interactions between sprites/entities. For example, if I was making a beat em up game and one player would pick up and slam another, would this most likely be animated as a new sprite merging the two or would that probably be two sets of animations that need to be completed for the attacker and victim? Thanks -lodger

excuse me, but this is kind of uncouth....bordering on childish. Spriter is an excellent tool, Spine might be as well. The time and energy of dev's is best spent working on the software, listening to people's feedback rather than diverting it into some silly rivalry. I mean no offence here, but I think we have better things to do/collaborate on.

for 2d animation, if your character is doing most of its animations standing still, i'd suggest not drawing your character at a perfect 90 degree east or west, but rather 3/4 view where you can see the other limb that is not in the front or back. For an example of what i'm talking about have a look at Capcom's animation for Street Fighter 2- very little is animated with a player facing hard left and right although gameplay is constrained to a 2d plain. Also, have a look at the minotaur that the brash team created for an example of what I mean.

for that, you would have the head, arms and legs separate from the chest and use scale to increase the size of the chest cavity.

Contraints for bones could be useful (limiting the extent that joints can bend to simulate natural joint restrictions.) Perhaps an "inverted order view" to make it easier to edit segments behind the primary parts. This could be difficult, but how about "render to sprite sheet" as an option?

some way to save the order of sprites and be able to toggle via a hotkey, etc (if that could be automated, that would speed up animation 10 fold, as i am working with models that have 360 degree parts). being able to delete/paste over frame 1

to make tweening easier, it would be great if there was a way to pre identify or save data for the center, rotation points, etc of the sprites being swapped out. it can be an issue swapping in sprites that have a different size/shape than what had previously been there. Also, for the long haul, a "someday, maybe" feature could be adding lumination to models or features to make palette swapping easier.

Here are a few fixes that would help a dilemma i'm facing with spriter now. Imagine you put together a running animation that has 12 keyframes once you are done making coarse edits. everything now works fine, but imagine you still want to add an object such as a weapon to the animation. you now have to paste it into each of the key frames, as it will disappear when the new one is added. here are a few ideas that could make this process easier. Keyframe resampling: how about a feature that takes "snapshots" every specified interval of all parts and converts that to keyframes, replacing the old ones. this would make it easier to do recursive animation and simply complex animations. also, along the lines of my earlier post, if you do have groups (i.e. front, middle, back, etc.) it would be amazing to have keyframes specific to them....this would also do TONS to speed up recursive animation. Finally, what about having an option on sprites in a frame that signifies that it is persistent in all subsequent keyframes until it is deleted? this would make it WAAAY easier to introduce items, etc into animations with many keyframes. Thanks for getting back to me so promptly on my early feedback- your team deserves kudos for really being in tune with what people need and incorporating feedback whenever possible.

in the menu where you set sprite hierarchy, it would be great if you could select, apply changes to, or change the heirchy of multiple sprites at a time by holding shift and clicking. also, it would be helpful if there were "tiers" or groups of sprites that were in relatively similar places that you could hit a number key and assign the sprite to that group. for instance, if there was a 2d character facing east, the parts of the left arm/left leg could be tier 1, body tier 2, and right limbs tier 3. With a feature like this, you could jump straight to a tier to save scroll time, could apply toggles to levels (visible/invisible/outline) which would greatly improve accuracy when placing sprites that are behind others finally, to make the editor on the sprite hierarchy screen more useful, it would be helpful if you could press a key and have the expanded palette for that sprite appear on the left, the focus of the leftmost panel. -Lodger

thanks for the suggestions! I am currently working with Hybrid poser/spriter models so the 3d thing is possible for sure. Hopefully I'll have some good results to share with everyone soon. Thanks!

I was wondering if anyone was using spriter/spriter style animation for 3/4 overhead/isometric games. Thus far with spriter, i've made some really good flat 2d running/walking/movement. I've tried 3/4 but am having a difficult time with things like swordslashing where an object like a sword takes on multiple perspective angles during an animation. Any experience/ suggestions for this sort of thing? Thanks! -Ron

awesome update!!!! has anyone figured out how to place bones yet? I know tutorials will be coming out soon, but i'm already trying to sort it out..haha. let me know if you get it sorted out! -Lodger

floor tiles, textures, and animated props, or backgrounds could be super helpful too.

og. being able to dump/screenshot individual items. I've actually found that spriter is a pretty easy way to compile larger body parts...it would be awesome to be able to compile and dump images to load into other animations reply "4. Hmm...individual items? Specific frames? or just like every currently selected sprite? ">> I was thinking individual frames. What I've been doing is taking 3 or so smaller moving parts and chunking them in spriter. I'm fairly new to graphic design and animation, so I'd been using spriter to assemble, for example, a forearm, hand and object it is holding and using printscreen to capture the compiled image. Since the time I posted this, I've begun just using layers in my graphic editing software to do the compiling. Nevertheless, a screenshot button could be helpful for part design, potentially. Again, thanks for all of your hard work and your quick and thoughtful reply.

hello First of all, I just want to say Spriter is BRILLIANT; its truly incredible to have a tool like that that really democratizes sprite creation. :) viva 2d! I wanted to take a second to share some early feedback on Spriter and its workflow. Here are a few things that could be super helpful. 1. include actual time markers on the timeline. If I am working off of recorded video and am basing animation on an actor's performance, matching the miliseconds to the actor would be super helpful! 2. the speed/slow animation is a really helpful feature. would it be possible to have an "apply timestretch" to a timeline where for example, i have a 1k ms animation and if its at 50% speed to flatted the duration of the animation to 1.5, adjusting to the new duration 3. the option of having a grid in the background to help make it easier to track object positions, 4. being able to dump/screenshot individual items. I've actually found that spriter is a pretty easy way to compile larger body parts...it would be awesome to be able to compile and dump images to load into other animations. 5. how about a dump to AVI feature? that could be helpful for collaboration with others, etc. 6. how about a way to copy a section of a timeline to a separate animation... or the ability to trim the beginning or ending from an animation 7. how about the ability to import spriter "models" into animations to make it easier to animate animations that involve other sprites. IE if you are animating a fighting game and a character throws an enemy, being able to import a separate model the complete the throw animation. What you all are doing is AMAZING and is a huge gift to the game creation world. Thank you so much for your combined efforts guys!