S4D Early Progress. Also how animate?

Posted by nap on Sept. 22, 2014, 10:59 p.m.

What's up everybody, I have started to only be active during competitions but oh well. College keeps me busy. Not that I ever posted much before.

Anyway my themes are awesome. Disaster, Decay, and Abandoned. Possibly the best default synergy I have seen from anyone. Plus it went right along with what I wanted to do. I'm thinking a fast pace run and gun survival game with as many different enemies as I can think of including at least a few major bosses.

So far the gameplay involves 2 enemies programmed, shooting, melee, and the main engine.

The enemies below were inspired by the flood from Halo. They leech on to you as shown below and must be melee'd off as they deal DoT.

The big dude standing there is going to be the first boss. The only problem is that I am terrible at sprites. Making that bojank looking mofo was hard enough. Animating him seems impossible. Does anyone know a good tool for animating pixel sprites that is better than GM?

Here is the guy now.

Anyway good luck everyone. All your shit looks fucking awesome from what I have seen. I'm excited to play some spooky games.

Comments

Zac1790 9 years, 7 months ago

From what I've heard GraphicsGale is the standard for drawing and animating pixel art. GM should be fine for this resolution though. Don't be afraid to get messy! Since GM lacks an onion skin I often will duplicate the current subimage, adjust the intensity to really high saturation or lightness (or low lightness). So that gives you this faded red or black or white version that you can draw over. Then when you're done looking at that remove color:red/white and adjust the threshold till all you see is the new one.

Edit: also, plus one for gameplay gif :D

Castypher 9 years, 7 months ago

While I like GraphicsGale, it does have a price tag on it. If you don't have the funds, a free alternative, as suggested by Mega, is Aseprite.

Moikle 9 years, 7 months ago

If I could somehow combine graphicsgale and paint.net, it would be the best animated sprite editor ever

Moikle 9 years, 7 months ago

the plugins made by the community are very good, and well integrated into the UI. The default filters/effects/etc. give you much more control than Photoshop's

GraphicsGale's layers are kind of substandard and paint.net's ones offer all the functionality you would expect, and have an easy to use GUI.

I suppose the main thing I like is all the plugins I have been collecting for it over the years.

it is like photoshop but is better for pixel/raster art rather than photos, and with a more approachable interface. so if I could add an animation timeline and onion skin onto it then it would be amazing

Moikle 9 years, 7 months ago

cool, I'll give you some recommendations for plugins in a bit

Mega 9 years, 7 months ago

Aseprite recently went commercial, though you can still get the original version free-of-charge. I still recommend it highly for animation work; even more so than GraphicsGale (Which is what I use when I can't use Aseprite for various reasons).

TacoBotProductions 9 years, 7 months ago

Moikle: Paint.net forever! I use it for everything. My only complaint is that, when used with Gm, it takes a while to open; while the built in editor is instant.

Moikle 9 years, 7 months ago

@taco

The built in editor is arse though

Acid 9 years, 7 months ago

I use gimp and the built in editor.

TacoBotProductions 9 years, 7 months ago

@Moikle

Agreed.