Anyone out there willing to give me some help making up the sprites for Leprechaun? (My Lode Runner style game for the SuperCharger, see my AtariAge blog for the current WIP.)

And I'm going to warn you ahead of time; you won't have many pixels to work with, or any colors either. But anything has to be better than simple squares.

How many frames of animation, and just how few pixels are we talking about here (what are the exact dimensions of the sprites)?

Also, how many directions?

4 sets of animation - running, swinging (rope 2nd row of pixels from top), climbing and digging/zapping (creates a hole in the ground). Each animation is 4 frames. (Left / Right will be handled via hardware or manual mirroring.)

Single color 8x8 pixel sprites; 5:3 pixel aspect ratio (2:1 is a reasonable approximation). However, the sprite (other than digging) should mostly stick to the middle 4 pixels in each row since that is the size of the background grid. Moving sprites move at a rate of 1 pixel per frame.

The digging sprites may use the entire 8 pixel width, although they will span two columns of the background grid. (So half is the current position, and the other half is over the hole.)

Attached are the C64 Lode Runner sprites for reference. (Although they only used 2 frame animation.)


Attached File(s)
 loderun.bmp ( 1.62k ) Number of downloads: 54

I'd be happy to give it a try

Cheers,
Ben

Give it a shot! If I get more than one result, I'll do different ones for the player and the enemies.

Here's a stab at it..

Run


Swing


Climb


Let me know if I got the dimensions right and I'll take a shot on a digging animation. Also I can make the legs on the swinging animation static if you prefer. The climb animation doesn't quite look right to me yet. What do you think?

Cheers,
Ben

This post has been edited by legeek: Sat Nov 26, 2005 9:13 AM

These are quite good! I especially like the swinging animation. I guess I won't bother making any attempt. =)

Thanks man.

revised climbing candidates




Cheers,
Ben

The 2nd looks better there, though I think they could still use some improvement. Maybe that's the best you can do with such a small sprite, though. The others are very nice, though.

Why not try a side view of a climber??

I liked the first climbing animation better. The second ones look like half an asterisk flipping back and forth.

The running animation needs some tweaking on the legs. Note that the legs never actually cross one another-- they just sort of extend and retract.

Suggestions are good. Samples are better.

Pfft, fine then.

I'm not totally happy with this, but at least the "foot" pixel should track forward movement perfectly, since it moves back one pixel per frame.

Attached image(s)

Call me stupid but where can I get this sprite animating utility? I would really like to try my hand at this.

There is no "sprite animating utility". What you're seeing are just ordinary animated GIFs.

I have to admit, this one is looking better to me.

Hi there!

Definitely an improvement!

Greetings,
Manuel

I see what you mean. I wonder if I can modify mine to be somewhere in between the two.

Cheers,
Ben

Revised Run


Cheers,
Ben

Will the player be allowed to stop while traversing an overhead wire? If so, the current proposed animation will look odd of the player stops.

You can use this on Windows (for animated gifs). Combined with a drawing program it can be workable.

This is the AniTuner utility for making animated cursors (or animated gifs)

it is quite useful to import/export to a directory of individual image files per frame and edit the text file directly to tune the per frame delay.

The player can stop, but only while "on grid", which will always be the first frame of the animation. (The player can, however, reverse direction "off grid".)

Not a fan of the one I did, Eric? Man, that was like 2 years ago. Time sure flies.



- Adam

This post has been edited by salstadt: Thu Dec 8, 2005 1:40 AM

No offense... but I see E.T. running away for his life!