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[Omega]

Hey All,

I'm working through spriting attacks for my project King's Crypt (In the dev log section too). The one thing I'm struggling with is finding a style of attack animation that doesn't just look cheap and flimsy. Thus far, my attempts look a little something like Link's Awakening, but I'm not happy with it. I'm hoping to find examples of games with smaller sprites (16x16 or less) that have better than average attack animations.

Surprisingly enough, googling for this hasn't really gotten me that far. Obviously I'm not looking to directly rip off anything, but instead learn and understand a few techniques that I can keep with me.

Any suggestions are welcome!

[Shambrook]

If you could post your sprite I could be more help, but I'll try.

Links awakening Link has a super basic 3 frame attack animation.
http://imgur.com/a/VcP1A
There's the anticipation. There's the action, then there's the end of the action. There's no real followthrough and there's a lot of travel time on the action. These are both bad for conveying snappy action. What you want to do is basically imply the action with a smear. Show the anticipation to teh action, show the charecter at the end of the action, but never show that middle bit. That's what makes something seem slow.

I did a quick mock up fo what I mean.
http://imgur.com/CY6vtTA
You could make it look better with better posing  or more frames in the anticipation/recovery, but the key is to make sure you avoid that frame of the weapon traveling. That is what's poison to making something snappy.