Animating video game sprites. A slow descent into madness…
Ten frames should be easy I thought. A simple animated loop. I’ll have the first pass roughed out by the end of the day.
How wrong I was.
A little backstory first. The character in question is for a homebrew 2D fighting game I’ve been developing over the past few years. From concepts scribbled on various scraps of paper. To frantic notes hastily written in many a .txt document. But mostly in the back of my mind whenever I’ve had five minutes to myself.
The desire to create a fighting game stems from all those great titles that I grew up with in the 80s and 90s. I’d play them in the local arcade and on my Megadrive and Playstation whenever I had the chance.
Well a couple of years back a homebrew game hit seemingly out of nowhere and made waves across the internet. Titled Vanguard Princess and developed solely by Suge9 who claimed to be a former Capcom employee. It was a fantastic declaration about what can be done with the Fighter Maker 2nd engine. A piece of software that until then I hadn’t even heard of. Even better was that I found a fantastic online community full of likeminded developers at FMHQ.us all using this software to develop their own games as well as helping each other solve problems, answer questions and posting up tutorials. Suddenly I realised that I have the tools to develop my very own fighting game at last!
Here’s the thing…
I’m not going to lie. Making a video game is hard work. I knew this from working in the industry for several years on titles that weren’t even all that spectacular or successful. What’s harder though is trying to make a game by yourself whilst also working full time. Since learning about Vanguard Princess I must have made three attempts over the years to start my own project. Only to give up every time because I felt it was too daunting a task or I was too busy with other things.
But those were just excuses. I’m tired of them. It’s time to put the fucking work in. Over the four day bank holiday Easter weekend I set about to create a seamless looped idle stance for my fighting game character. As is typical in these sorts of games there are sprite sheet limitations so you only have so many frames to do this with. I wanted mine to roughly come in at around nine to twelve frames. As I sat down and began it quickly became apparent that no matter what I did each and every pass at this seemingly simple animation looked more and more horrible.
This was four days of solid work trying to get a simple loop to look right and I just couldn’t do it. I’m at the first hurdle and failing miserably already! How do the artists at Capcom and SNK make it look so effortless?? As I got more and more frustrated that familiar voice in the back of my head was already telling me to quit. “It’s too much bother. Forget about it. Play some GTA and have fun.”
Still I didn’t give up. I got my head down and powered through like a champ. During the week I found time in the evenings to work on the character some more but still he looked off and the frustration was starting to make itself felt. Again, I didn’t give up.
Then came saturday and I finally found myself staring at this rough animated stick figure on my screen going back and forth in a ready stance, and despite him only being such a simple looking thing he had movement and life and it didn’t look completely shit.
I plan on cleaning him up over over the next couple of days, blocking out his shape, mass and clothing before bringing him down into Photoshop to do the pixel version. I’ll post the results here for people to see. Once I’m a little more comfortable with my process I’ll probably do a write up on the workflow as a sort of tutorial for anyone who might be interested.
