Sorry for the dead link for a few days...it should be working now though, heh.
Angels Eternity: I don''t work for any company yet...I''ve just finished college and after I slack off for another month (I mean work on the tutorial, heh) I''m going to try applying and see if I can get in doing some Game Boy Advance games. Right now I''m just a jobless bum, though.
st0ven: Sweet animation...I like the sketches of the guy doing the spinning kick a lot. They flow really nice, heh...
TechnoHydra: Any discussion is good discussion.
For a Zelda style game where you''re running around with a set limit on the box, you''d have to either shrink the sprites so everything can fit in the box, or attatch extra sprites. Shrinking sprites generally sucks because 16x16 is small enough already, and if you have to make your character a little 8x8 blob to fit a sword, it''ll look pretty bad. This is where you''d have to ask the programmer how he wants to do it (or if you ARE the programmer, figure out the way you want to go). You could just use bigger sprites for when the sword is being swung, and just offset the sprite in the code so it lines up right...but generally you''d probably have to use a second sprite box.
So doing the animation for a slash below you (thinking Zelda here), you''d make a 16x32 box and draw the animation in that, and afterwards go through and divide it up into 2 16x16 boxes (each would have X amount of animation frames to it). When the game is being displayed, the engine would have to place the box below the player and flip through the animation frames for each. As long as the engine isn''t ridiculously slow it should look just fine. If you''ve got a limit on how many frames of animation you can use, you could even cheat a bit and have the character reach forwards to the edge of his 16x16 box, and then just have the other box animate with the sword slashing, so only the sword frames need animating instead of the entire body. I think that''s what Zelda did (though it''s been a while since I''ve played it).
For drawing purposes though, you''d just want to make your sprites in the 16x32 box and worry about dividing it up later. Just make sure you don''t have him taking 33 pixels or something, because then that''s a THIRD box you have to attatch, and it''ll slow the engine down.
Oh wait, another thing you can do if you''re stuck with a size limit and don''t want to line sprites up, is to just shift the player around. Say you have a guy who has his sword put away and his stance is really wide (takes up the whole sprite). Then he slashes...you could have his back up against the back of the box and the sword out touching the front of the box so that he gets a whole slash in, and in the game, offset it so the foot lines up right. The problem with this is that you have to squish your character''s movements to fit in the box. Like you can''t have him slash forwards while lunging forwards so his back leg is straight, and have his arm sticking out, because his arm and leg PLUS the length of the sword would make things too long. But, if you can''t get around the limits any other way, this can sometimes be pulled off to look pretty good.
Basically a sprite artist would want to be able to use any box size they need so they can do the animation easily...Programmers would want to stick with a uniform sprite size so they engine is easier to write, heh...Code tends to be less flexible than art though, so if you can work around what the programmer needs, that''s generally better. Someone''s got to give in.
- Tsugumo
KAWAI ! :p
