slynyrd

Devlog - 10

Added 2023-01-13 17:38:03 +0000 UTC

Finally getting this mech moving! Personally, the greatest hurdle to making game art is sprite animation. A one off animation ain't so bad, but when you have to string together a multitude of animations from various positions while maintaining consistency of design, proportion, and motion, it's a whole different beast. Compared to Hyper Echelon, where most sprites always face one direction, I'm going to have to up my game to crack this nut.

I'm using a layered approach to execute the mech animations. This requires high organization, but offers great flexibility once you get things in order. This technical approach lends itself to the mechanical motion of machine designs, but I recommend animating with layers for just about any subject. At least, to get started, I often move around layers to get some rudimentary movement before baking things together and further manipulating the sprite.

After many iterations, I'm finally starting to feel good about the basic walk motion. The subtle overshoot motions and dust effects really help sell it. Had to break it into 16 frames to incorporate that, but there are only 8 main poses. It shouldn't be too difficult to build off this for the other directions, however, if I decide to change something I have to reflect that change in all positions, thus is the great challenge of sprite animation. Oh boy, we're just getting started. One frame at a time, one frame at a time!