Platformer Sprites (WIP)

[ericbloom]

I'm new to this, and am having a lot of fun. I could use some feedback on a couple of walk cycles :

This guy is still rough. I really want this enemy to feel *heavy* when walking, and it's not quite there yet. His attack will be a smash attack:



I'm much happier with this enemy walk, though it's more of a traditional walk and easier to plan out. (Really huge shout out to Tsugumo's Mage Knight thread for giving me the smoke and spark idea:http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic=3421.0)



And here he is shooting and resting:



I'd show them at the original sizes too, but I'm at work. I'll update with the main character's run when I get a chance.

[Grimsane]

great weight with the little guys, and nice movement and the particles and auxiliary animation works well

the way you posted made it hard to do this edit because it wouldn't scale back very friendly, but here's an attempt, get in the habit of animating with timing (xxxms) most game engines can load the timing from gifs if you load it like that, constant frame rate animations is quite a hindrance when you try doing subtle and even snappy motions


took a frame out and added a bounce divided into two half speed frames

[wurfle]

The body of the first one looks very soft to me, not like metal at all. Stiffening up that big middle section should help a lot.

[Tourist]

Here's a pretty good tutorial on making characters seem more massive:

http://brendanbody.blogspot.com/2010/04/weight-problem.html

The short version is that:

• All things fall at the same rate
• Not all things are the same size.
• You can indicate how large or massive something is by changing the rate at which it falls relative to it's visual size.
• The same applies to horizontal motion.

Hope this helps,
Tourist

[buddy90]

Well, I noticed your big dude walks a lot like a gorilla. Maybe you can use that as reference

[ericbloom]

Grimsane, yes! That small change really added an oomph that I was trying to get.

Tourist: Thanks for the link, I'll keep this in mind on my next revision, since Wurfle is right about the bendyness.

Here are original sizes as well as the main character himself:





Edit Updated Smasher:

[ericbloom]

A rough of the attack. I'm learning the importance of the roughs and playing with the blur frame.





Updated. Anyone have any tricks for the blur effect?

[Lazycow]

Yeah, great!

-
old - new

What about not using one continuous motion blur, but fragment it a bit. This could simulate individual animation frames, merged into one.

Other than that: Although all the moves of the robot are superb, I think motion blur and "heavy-movement" are mutual exclusive. Would you expect fast movement from a massive house-hight unit? Hm... I don't know. Maybe not.

PS: the forum has an included zoom function, just click on the image.

[ericbloom]

That's a really good point, and I think I was too interested in making a smashing blur attack that I hadn't considered if it felt right. While it isn't meant to be house-high, I do want it heavy. I think a slow wind-up attack would make a lot of sense.

I'm gonna keep working on this. Thanks for the tip on the blur as well.

The one problem with the zoom (on chrome at least) is that it anti-aliases the image. Can that be shut off?

[Lachie Dazdarian]

Not sure about the color depth you are using, but for these sort of blur animations what works the best (IMO) are sections that start with 0 opacity and go to full opacity as the object/limb moves in a certain direction. Or maybe it can be done with dithering instead manipulating transparency.  Full color sections just feel a bit too solid to me to illustrate swooping movement effectively.