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[GhostBomb]

I always thought player character sprites were the biggest pain to make.  You need to make sprites for running, jumping, shooting in different directions, or a mix of the three.  What's the most efficient way, both in terms of art and coding, to deal with sprites for a 8 direction platformer/shooter similar to Metroid or Contra?

[Conker534]

well you could always mirror half the sprites

[ink.inc]

what he's takling about entails more than just that

anyway just treat the unit like a paper doll and all of its arms and legs etc. separately, then draw the appropriate one at the appropriate coordinates in the draw event.

to clarify: determine the appropriate animations/arm leg sprites in the step event. to take metroid as an example, if the player is holding the up key, switch the arm sprite to the 'aim up' sprite.

and then in the draw even, just draw those sprites at the appropriate joints.

[Conker534]

oh derp

[ink.inc]

games that do this well: anything by vanillaware

http://www.spriters-resource.com/playstation_2/odinsphere/

http://www.majhost.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=221587&n=432

[Titanium]

This depends on what you need them to be doing and how closely the players will be looking.

For ODIN SPHERE, the game shown above, there are occasions when the top-half is doing something and the bottom, a completely different thing, therefore; on a technical level, splitting up the character this way is the most intelligent way to do things.

However, if you're character has simple pre-defined actions that you need to switch to and fro and you're not very artisticlly inclined( I know I'm not  ) It's OK to have an action-by-action system.