turosteel

Here's what I have so far:
 

 
Is this the style you had in mind?

It worked perfectly! Thanks @lucid for your quick reply and desire to help! Thanks BrashMonkey Team for the excellent fixes!

@turosteel there was a bug fixed in the latest version of Spriter released after you made this post.
Please see if you still have the issue in the new version.  This will not fix any projects that were already corrupted. 

If you have important work that was corrupted and you don't have an earlier back up for, feel free to send me the project files to lucid@brashmonkey.com, and I will see if I can repair them
 

I second the idea of using the spacebar to play/pause the animation.

Yeah, sorry about the never ending battle with spam-bots... We're still getting the hang of this new forum system and still learning the best methods of keeping the spam at bay.
 
allthough in this case, I cant tell if its a spambot or a confused person who's native tongue is not English...
 
cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

Thanks very much for the kind words and support James W.
 
We've got quite a bit of new features and awesomeness planned for this year, which will all be free updates for Spriter Pro owners.
 
Cheers,
Mike at BrashMonkey

Upon re-reading this post of mine, please keep in mind I'm not talking specifically about you or directly to you..as I've seen and tried to help several artists who fell into this trap early on.. and when this topic comes up I tend to cover all the points and flavors of every incident with each of the specific artists.  So please know I'm not trying to pin any psychological or philosophical position onto you... just trying to cover all the bases for any other artist as well who might stumble upon this forum thread when facing the same issue/decision.
 
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
 
 
Hi again Symbolic.
 
To use fantastically appropriate word-play, no matter how you cut it, creating the level as one giant illustration is just a bad idea.
 
1) Super hard and time consuming to drastically edit a levels design after you've already created it, which is in the vast majority of games, especially side scrolling games, critical for ensuring fun gameplay!
 
2) Super wasteful of the platform's texture space...no matter how small you cut up a giant painting, its still ALL THERE... Imagine you cut it into 4096x4096 textures...you're still going to have at least two of these taking up texture space at a time at all times...and even this size is far bigger than ideal for optimal
performance.
 
3) Super wasteful of the games file-size, download size.
 
In short, using giant bitmaps for levels (even cut into pieces after the fact then reassembled in the game engine) is nothing but an inexperienced game maker trying to make something work within their current experience and tool-set comfort level.  This is an age old problem..people bending over backwards to try to rationalize and execute a very un-optimal solution to a situation using whatever limited knowledge base and tool set they currently have.  It typically leads to either disaster or a drastically inferior final product taking drastically longer to make, causing immense stress, frustration and exhaustion for the artist and delaying or dooming the entire project.
 
 
Please consider that taking a few days to research a more optimal option will empower you for the rest of your life, (all future game projects) and will end up saving you a ton of time and energy over the remaining course of this project, and for every future game project for the rest of you life. It's THAT important.
 
Important points I want to make:
 
1) Please DO use illustrator, but NOT to create entire levels, only to design the segments you will use to create the entire level in a proper level editor.
 
2) Please always do your research as thoroughly as possible when confronted with any new MAJOR task.  Creating many large levels for  a game is a HUGE undertaking, and it's critical you "power up" before you dive in blind and shoot yourself and the entire project in the foot with an "I'll wing it" approach.
 
3) An unwillingness to learn and add new tools for the right job to your tool belt will lead to  drastically more depressing and unsuccessful life.
 
did you click the link I provided to those resources for 2d level editing in Unity? The Smart-Sprite functionality is definitely one of the things you should learn and strongly consider using. Rayman Legends is an absolutely gorgeous game who's levels often look very much like giant hand painted masterpieces, but its all smart-sprites and re-used hand placed scaled and rotated segments.
 
Here's a peak into what a truly great 2d level editor looks like: https://youtu.be/y-chi097uV4?t=7m7s
 
As you can see, its a more advanced version to smart-sprites but extremely similar.
 
I assume you wouldn't draw every blade of grass from scratch no matter what... so instead of making a group of grass blades and stamping them around in Illustrator, please make your group of grass and stamp it around in a level editor, so its actually a small image being reused in an optimized manner in the game.
 
Lecture now over. Thanks for your patience. :)
 
Cheers,
Mike

Hi SymboliC,
 
I say this with absolute respect and in an attempt to protect your time, energy, and sanity.  This is a common and terrible beginners mistake/misconception.  Levels should be bade out of small, reusable segments (which you can create with anything you'd like)...otherwise you'll cripple the games performance, take much longer to create each level or heaven forbid change a level,  and drastically increase the games overall file-size. Hint, if the graphics program is limiting a max size, its for a reason.
 
I just recently had to talk a beginner game artist friend of mine (who was trying the same thing with Photoshop) down off of that same ledge. Photoshop was slowing to a crawl on his system, but he expected a game, with lots more additional art (animations), a ton of math, collision detection, game logic etc to not crawl while displaying the same image?  Yes, you can chop up the full level to more manageable chunks (for game performance), but level editing and reediting is still just as big an issue or bigger, because the chopping up and putting back together in game is now another step.
 
Ironically, my friend, who was resistant to reusing art then showed me his finished giant hand painted level, and there was tons of reuse anyway.
 
Please look into level editors and tile map editors that work well with Unity ASAP. A Game level can look 100 percent hand painted and still be made out of carefully crafted and reused (with scaling, flipping and rotation..and even color tinting) small segments.
 
PS, Rayman Legends uses the same system of tiling art and reusing small chunks of earth, grass, platform, etc etc.
 
I hope this comes across as helpful and not annoying or pushy.. I've just seen fellow artists exhaust themselves due to this very "idea", only to end up having to redo all the levels they made later, the right way...because not only did it prove to take far too long (especially because there will ALWAYS be constant needs to redesign levels) but because the games performance became absolutely terrible.
 
So, my two cents as an over decade long professional game artist... measure twice, cut once.. do your research and force the programmer to do very realistic benchmarks to make sure you're not making a game in a manner that will destroy itself. I highly recommend you research all your level creation options for Unity.

Again, my alarmist arm waving and hyperbole comes from a strong desire to protect a fellow artist from something that will cause much pain and exhaustion (and typically depression)....This very thing has destroyed countless game projects in their tracks.
 
Sorry if this comes off as abrasive.
 
cheers,
Mike.... but speaking as a pro game artist, NOT as a representative of BrashMonkey in this case.

Ok, so no one said nothing on this? how is that.
 
This is simple my friend. 
 
First thing, using filters in pshop or whatever is not bad, for effects.
 
If you want to have it perfect without transparency problems we will stick with Antialias (plenty of colors, no hard pixels, just default brush ok) if you want it with hard pixels (traditional pixel art) you must use something like alpha threshold and clean borders at all frames after finishing.
 
So, first thing you want a fireball ok? 
 
Make the colors, inside white, then yellow, and then red (you can use whaever colors), now copy that layer, and in the new copy apply a filter of BLUR or GAUSSIAN BLUR or alike, ok?
 
now change the mode of that layer to ADD. now duplicate that copy layer like 3 or 4 times and it will bring more "Shine" to it. 
 
This is the basis for all fire FX and shinings.
 
You can change the layer modes and experiment with different colors.
 
Hope it helps.