A little hiatus, but here's some fun with subpixel animation. Learning pixel animation has a definite feature-creep to it:



One trick was to keep the central portion from moving at all, yet still conveying movement. This will let us use it as a moving platform on the central portion without worrying about pixel jitter.

Good point. I got pretty carried away. The larger size gave me more room to play, plus I'm getting more comfortable making these and I think detail is a natural feature creep.

Edit:

Here is a current WIP of the background by another artist. We still need to tweak colors to get characters working with the background. The idea behind the additional detail on the tread creature was to make it more of a background element having the same level of detail.

Any advice on keeping the character visible on the background?



The background artist, Harry, also has a webcomic worth checking out! http://demonsmirror.com/

@snake85027 & |||| : Thanks! That means a lot. Animation has always been really interesting to me, and it's a lot of fun to have a project to get into.

@PypeBros : I'm not sure what happened, I typed up a response a week or so ago and it seems to have been lost. Basically: Thanks. That was really helpful feedback.

I've gone into all the sprites and made the arms with continuity in mind. The earliest sprites had the more stylized arms. I did so thinking it would create a nice silhouette. In practice I found giving the arms more substance (on a sprite this size that means another pixel in width) made for better animations. Here are a few cleaned up versions:



Note: The army crawl is unchanged. I'm posting it to show all his movement states. The sprints are pushed a little more to add some oomph. I added a more detailed idle too. Idles are a lot of fun, and I might pack more into it.

I'm still scratching my head as to what I can add to the single frame slide and hurdles since there's minimal amount of shading to add subpixel animation, and they're really small sprites to jitter an entire pixel. I might add dust effects to the slide?

Really cool concept. Looking forward to seeing some of the gameplay. What platforms is this being optimized for?

It works much better at this speed. The only part where it seems that some more intermediate frame could help is when he recovers his arms before standing up.

A second item that looks curious is the smoke during the "walk" cycle. There's a first puff (greyish - dust? ) when landing and a second one (blue-ish -- steam ?) when lifting. My concern is that the two puffs seem to come from the same place and behave the same, as if produced by the same cause, while the cause obviously can't be the same.



I note these frame have 170ms delay (opposed to 30ms for other part of the animation that are equally dynamic).
(Btw, it looks like you could easily opt for vector animation of that bot's arms with no loss of detail).

Thanks for the input. The first puff is meant to be dust, the second steam. Maybe a more extreme color shift could keep these separate.

How would I go about adding vector animation?