Abuse style platforming

Hey! Glad the site and forums are starting to come back up.

I did some searching and couldn't quite find what I was looking for, I think I need to either use families or containers but I'm not really grasping their usage quite yet.

Basically, I'm looking to emulate the movement style in the old school DOS game Abuse. Video here real fast, you only need to see about five seconds of it to see what I mean:

[tube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeLdGtyuZ14[/tube]

Basically, I'm working on a platformer, and the behavior for movement is fine but it'd be swell to be able to point and aim a gun / melee weapon with the mouse, and also have the character turn around when the mouse is moved to the side they aren't facing. I'm thinking it'd be something like spawning the arms / weapon etc at an image point, and then telling the weapon / arm sprite to face the mouse, but I won't lie I'm pretty green at this.

If there is another thread about this please direct me, I tried to find something first but I must be using too many words haha.

Thanks in advance and looking forward to really getting under the hood on this ;)

What it comes to my mind is to have one sprite for legs animations and another sprite for body.

Legs are quite obvious. For body you coud have few animations like:

-look right,

-look up-right (diagonnaly)

-look up

then mirror them and comapare some angles to play animation when mouse is in specific location

this might help a bit

dl.dropbox.com/u/9050706/Cap%26autre/help.cap

Shinkan yea, totally what I was thinking was just to have the arms be separate, everything else would be running on one single sprite with different anims.

thoughtzone, exactly, EXACTLY what I was looking for. I am going to dissect if that's ok ;) btw your sprites are hysterical haha.

I couldn't really get started because if I couldn't do this I would have to change the whole gameplay mechanic and I was trying to wrap my head around it but couldn't. This is mint :) thanks again!!