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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperArt (Moderator: JWK5)Breaking down the 8-way attack sprites in games like Crawl and Hyper Light?
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Author Topic: Breaking down the 8-way attack sprites in games like Crawl and Hyper Light?  (Read 2346 times)
vserga
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« on: December 01, 2017, 09:12:56 AM »

Hello.

I am thinking of trying to make a hack n slash game like a Hyper Light Drifter or Crawl and I am looking at the way the characters are animated.

I noticed some games have the character graphics for each direction (up, up-right, right, down-right, etc), but in HLD the running animation only has only Up/Down/Left/Right and in Crawl it only has Left/Right. Crawl especially seems like a great way of saving time with graphics. However in both HLD and Crawl when the character attacks it actually looks likes there's potentially many animations which I think they do with sneaky tricks. I am having trouble breaking this down exactly.

For example in Crawl is there only one main animation used, but the slashing effect has 8 directions? I am not sure if the main animation has two types though, one for attacking upwards and another for attacking downwards.

I am unsure how HLD does it too. It looks like it may have 8 main animations, one for attacking in each direction.

What do you think is the best approach?

I am thinking having one animation, like Crawl, for running, and have the body have one animation when attacking but crucially have two separate animations for the head/arms which is different depending on if you are attacking upwards and downwards. The slash effect would be 8 directional.
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-Ross
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« Reply #1 on: December 01, 2017, 06:43:08 PM »

As far as I can tell from in-game, HLD just has animations for each of 4 directions. (And left and right are just flipped, so really only 3.) It's honestly pretty amazing how little you notice this stuff when you're playing a game.
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zizulot
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« Reply #2 on: December 03, 2017, 04:58:33 AM »

Totally agree with Ross, I see the same
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Staleevolution
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« Reply #3 on: January 21, 2018, 07:45:41 PM »

From my experience and without really looking into Crawl’s frames I know you can draw out one of the direction’s attack and
Then just copy image as needed and manipulate the specific body part.  For instance, GIMP is a great free tool to create pixel art such as these games.
I will draw one frame, duplicate the layer (image), highlight and select the duplicate image, cut it, repaste it and as it is pasted, the outline of image will flicker
and so I will take the flip tool and click on image to switch directions.  To make it face in the down positions, I just transform the image to desired rotation.  Now
you can do that with specific body parts as well.  Matter of playing around.  Not sure this helps, but good luck.
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Peace Soft
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« Reply #4 on: January 30, 2018, 02:45:41 PM »

In my experience the fastest & most versatile way to do it is a modular thing. Like each character is one sprite with however many "leaning into the attack" frames you need-- between 1 and 4 depending on whether you're gonna mirror left and right, and whether you want verticals too. But the actual arm that they attack with, and the weapon it's holding if any, are separate sprites, animated in only 1 direction, that can be mirrored or rotated around an origin point where they attach to the "shoulder" of the wielder's sprite.

This is kind of a pain in the ass to set up, but then it lets you play freely with tons of options.
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