Week 1 – Sprite Sheet
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This first week of blogging I’ve chosen a spritesheet I made as my artefact to talk about. This spritesheet is of our player avatar plane, there is a total of 28 different frames. On the top row is the animation for when the plane shoots, there are five frames for each shot. There is also when the plane turns left respectively right including the five frames it takes to shoot; this is so you can shoot whilst turning left or right without having to use the animation for shooting when you’re not turning. I was not the one that painted the original sprites, but I have learned from them what it takes to get make a good sprite and spritesheet. For starters; the plane was very big and had a large resolution, if we would have used it as it was it would have taken up most of the screen in-game, so I had to tediously resize every single on of the frames, wich took a long time. Another thing was the the shooting animation, though funny and impressive at close inspektion, is subtle and mostly unnecessary from afar. The second frame in the shooting animation is unnoticeable from this distance from the plane, we could have saved time and work not being so detailed on something that is so small. The second row of the spritesheet is the player death animation. If the player gets shot down the animation will play from the first frame of the second row, this will make it look like the plane cathes fire, loses altitude and crashes into the ground and dies a fiery death. But if there is a second way to die and that is flying into a mountain. This animation would be weird and unfitting, a plane crashing straight in to what is essentially a wall and then continous through it, loses altitude and crashes into what seems to be a very low mountain. That is why the ninth frame of the second row is an instant death animation. What is beautiful about this is that the entire second row is used for death no. 1, but part of it, frames 9 – 13, works as an instant death animation. This is a good move on our part and it saved us time and work for what is essentially the same result. When I made these spritesheets, the most tedious part was resizing the frames one by one, but countering that was an unexpected blessing; using a program known as GlueIt. All I had to do was load the pictures into the program and it sorted the frames out and made it into a sprite sheet for me. With pixel perfect finish. Another thing I had to to was measure and document the size of the frames so our programmers could more easily cut them out. For the future I will check how the animation looks when it is the right size so we don’t end up with unnecessary frames and I do not know if there is a simpler way to resize many frames without painting them small at first, which would be difficult.  |
