Personally, I liked your retro "lush" colours. Art doesn't always have to be so moody.

Nice. It really helps add weight to the take-off and landing, and the arm movement, well, is smooth now. I've usually been afraid to tween on finished frames, figuring it will be too messy of a job mucking around with the details and such. You've shattered that misconception for me, thanks.

BOING!

I'm here! Personally, I am going to go with the "glide" option for the more arcadey feel. Actually, you're never going to see Brucey moving much on the screen due to scrolling, and so the issue is almost a moot one, but...

WTF... ?! Did I just see Bruce up above in the banner? Heh.

Uh, where was I. Oh yes. Unless you have an large number of frames, then you get a jerky update on the sprite movement, where the whole body jumps by a large amount each frame. This more appropriate, IMO, for something like Prince of Persia or Karateka where movement and positioning is intended to be exact. With an arcadey game, though, IMO it should be as liquid as possible on-screen. Jerky movement also complicates collision detection, as it's possible to "jump" through a collision hotspot or what have you. So, gliding is usually what you get in most games.

However, if you calculate the horizontal movement rate based on the animation speed and resulting distance between strides over time, as you guys have analyzed in previous posts, then your character will still travel the same distance as with the jerky update method, but with the smooth motion. The feet slide a little, but it's forgivable. This is what I've done for SAKFU, and really I don't see it as "gliding" around much. A lot of that has to do with the animation too.

If you *do* have a lot of frames for your walking/running animation, then even though it looks better with the "jerky" movement method than a lower frame count does, it's still worthwhile, IMO, to use the glide motion because the gliding will be even less apparent due to the high frame rate. Apparent sliding is minimal. The feet will appear to be properly placed, especially when scrolling; which, by the way, cancels out the exact-foot-placement effect anyway using the jerky method. You can't scroll jerkily without making people sick.

Anyway, that's my take on it... smoothness over exact placement, but with effort spent on matching the rate of movement to the animation. I may need to fix up Bruce's foot placement some more to make the linear motion correct, but again, with the scrolling it's probably not necessary. JUST KICK STUFF!

EDIT:

I'm modifying the animation as we speak to square up the distance of the steps in each frame... post shortly.

Here:


I've also raised him up an extra pixel in the middle of his stride to smooth out the vertical motion.