Drew

That sounds interesting. Thanks for the heads up. What I'm probably going to do for now is just animate by hand in photoshop. There won't be many frames anyway. I'm going to put this off and work on building the levels in case anything changes my mind. Most of the attacks are going to be fast sword attacks and whatnot anyway, so I have to draw at least a few different poses anyway.

Hmm, I don't know. I've never been a fan of vector art. It just looks too cartoony. This game is going to have a semi-realistic look sort of like a typical Castevania game or something. The backgrounds will all be hand drawn pixel art in Photoshop. I didn't want the main characters to stand out as being "different." I'm trying to give this game a retro look. I don't think I have any programs that would be able to create vector art anyway. I don't really know of any other way to do it other than vector or pixel.

Thanks for the quick reply. I hope Spriter gets support for pixel art soon. I was hoping to get my first game out within the next 4 to 5 months. Also, I should mention that I the characters I make for this game will all be using swords and whatnot, so I hope you get it set up so we can adjust the hit box on the characters. That way I can set the hit box to be on the "sword" itself and make it more realistic during attack animations. I'll go ahead and send that guy a copy of the files. To further expand on point 4, I was trying to play with the anchor command. I was locking the feet down so I could make the body move up and down a little bit just for an idle animation. However, it was not producing good results. The feet kept pointing in awkward directions. I needed them to be perfectly straight, because you know he is on the ground, and they shouldn't be able to move. So, I tried removing the foot bone and using the bone from the lower leg to control the feet to see if it would product better results. It still wasn't the best. But then the issue I was having was that the feet did not want to be assigned to the leg bone. I deleted every frame in the animation, and I kept having to reassign them. I just wanted them to always be assigned. So, I would click on the timeline to create a new frame for the animation, and the bones would not be assigned anymore. It could be just me not knowing what I'm doing. While playing with it, I actually got the best result when the feet were not assigned to anything. They did not move when I made the guy crouch. After playing with it some more today, I found the best way was to put the feet bones back in, and simply turn off the rotation on the feet bones, then anchor the lower leg bones. This let me crouch while keeping the feet firmly planted, so I guess that's the best solution for now. Anyway, in the meantime, I'm not sure what I should do. If I'm better off waiting for better pixel art support, then I don't want to pull my hair out trying to force it. I guess I can work on level design or something. I could also do my original plan which was to animate the characters by hand in Photoshop. The animations would only have a couple frames each though, which is why I bought Spriter. But I don't know. I guess it depends on how many months it takes to get the Spriter/C2 updates.

I bought Spriter Pro a few days ago after trying the free version. It seemed to work fine with the demo files. However, my first attempt at an animation has been an utter failure...and for all the wrong reasons. I realize it's beta, but I can't even use it. I must be doing something wrong. Here are the issues I've run into so far. I can't even complete my first animation. 1. I created some pixel art in photoshop and saved each body part to a separate file. I don't know any easier way to do this. I found some scripts that were supposed to help with PSD files into Spriter, but they did not work. So, I had to save 20 images (left leg, right foot, etc.) and then drag them out one at a time in Spriter. 2. To makes things worse, the image was extremely blurry when zoomed, so it was impossible for me to align anything. Any zoom at all produces extreme blurriness. Photoshop on the other hand can zoom and retain the pixels so I can see what I'm doing. So, I don't know what the issue is. Maybe it's anti-aliasing? If I can't see each pixel with hard edges, I can't line up the art assets. The image was small, maybe 100 pixels tall. That's how pixel art is supposed to be. If it gets much larger, we start dealing with more pixels and it looks different. I was going to resize the image in Construct 2, which I've done before and it works fine. 3. It was extremely hard to assign bones. Maybe the hit box on the bones is too big, but I could not for the life of me click a bone, hold B, and assign an object to it. It would not click anything. I had to do a lengthy walkaround. I had to lock the bone, drag the object away, unlock the bone, click the bone, hold B, click the object, lock the bone again, drag the object back where it should be, and unlock the bone again. Add my number 2 point above to this, and it gets very frustrating. If I had just been allowed to click a bone, hold B, and click an object from the menu, all of this would have been solved... 4. Maybe I am just not very good at the program, but I had trouble getting the program to behave. I would make sure there are no key frames or whatever they are called, go back to the first point, and delete a bone to try something different. Like say to delete a foot bone and use the lower leg bone to control the foot. Well, I did that and it kept not wanting to keep it assigned. The foot would go back to not being assigned to the lower leg bone. I don't know why it's so picky. I deleted everything in the animation window at the bottom, and tried again with no success. Maybe there is something I'm not doing. 5. Then, I duplicated the animation. I then tried tried to delete the first animation, but it wouldn't let me. I could rename the first animation, but not delete it. I have no idea why. 6. Okay, so I manage to create a very crude animation. For the reasons above, I did not try to get fancy. I just wanted to import it into Construct 2 and test it. Well, it didn't work. I have imported the demo guy into Construct 2, so I know I can do it. But I imported "my" animation into Construct 2, and it looks okay. I set the starting animation to "idle." I run the test to see what it looks like. Well, it plays an animation that doesn't exist. The guy's foot rotates and flies away while getting bigger and distorted. I thought, okay I messed up something in Spriter. So, I go back to Spriter, and that animation does not exist. I can not play it back or see it. My real "idle" animation just had a little movement in it. This was something, I don't know what. I tried saving and bringing it back into Construct 2 clean, but it did the same thing... So, that's it for tonight. I am worn out from trying to get it to work. I don't even know if I'm just doing it wrong, or if it just isn't working right.