My Sprite Animating Tool is now in Beta!

Hi everyone,

After a year of hard work my Sprite Editing tool (for making modular sprite animations ala Vectorman, Alien Soldier and OdinSphere) is finally in beta.

If you're interrested, please visit to check out videos and download the beta.

I'd love your help finding any bugs and making feature requests.

thanks much.

BrashMonkey

Looks awesome. Will download as soon as I get the chance.

Watching your videos about it now - i get the impression you are supposed to move objects using the keyboard. If that's the case, can I recommend you add handles for moving, rotating and scaling, so that editing can be done more visually?

I've been anxiously awaiting the release of this, thank you for all your hard work and effort, it's appreciated.

Now to see how it works...

Seems to be a great tool ! I'll take a look at it .

Watching your videos about it now - i get the impression you are supposed to move objects using the keyboard. If that's the case, can I recommend you add handles for moving, rotating and scaling, so that editing can be done more visually?

Hi GMG,

thanks for watching the vids. I do plan on eventually adding "handles" to a selected part for manipulating ivia the mouse, this feature is at the far back of the list though, behind any bug fixes and several highly important features like "scale entire project". I hope I get through the list quickly.

The other critical issue is to get a plugin made for Construct to automatically support the data that my tool exports! Please help spread the work about this tools usefullness and maybe we can get a bid going to help give a good plug in coder the right incentive and ability to dedicate a long stretch of time to making such a sophisticated plug-in.

-BrashMonkey

This looks like pure awesome! Character mapping is an especially impressive feature. One question, though - can you have multiple character maps active at one time? For example, separate sets of swords, shields and armor.

But, in any case, I really want to see a Construct plugin for this tool made, as well! I hope you find a coder who's willing to do it!

Candescence

It would depend on the plug in, but thats the plan. (To support multiple Charactermaps at once) You'd have to be careful what order to apply the character maps in, so one wouldn't undo the effects of the other.

Please help spread the word to every game making and game artist forum you know of.. the more people talking about it the more likely support for the tool will appear for Construct AND all the other popular game authoring systems.

Sounds cool, but I would also advise making an export to image feature in the meantime, so the animations are at least usable even in programs that aren't integrated to it, and people would be a bit more motivated to spread the word and want plugins for their favourite game-making programs.

good suggestion Candescene,

After I'm sure all critical features are in and all critical bugs are taken care of, it will be the top priority.

This is amazing tool with incredible features!

I making a game with an exact gameplay as in "Odin Sphere" and "Muramasa The Demon Blade" (which Brashmonkey proclaimed as reference for this tool) and this utility will be finest help to make a serious indi-platformer. I used to make character animations in Anime Studio, but this tool will be more usefull because of it's unique features: "character maps�, variables, export features, handy folder's structure and other.

It surely need some improvements, but it will be a Holiday of all holidays and a great gift for all Construct community when somebody make an import plugin for this programm.

Thanks for the kind words Inca. I'll keep improving the tool as much as possible... please join the forum at and post and feature request, suggestion, or bug that you find.

How about it, any construct extension programmer willing to take this on? Unfortunately I recently lost my day job, but I can definately work out at lease a little financial incentive for any skilled extension programmer who can get the plugin made properly.

I'm hoping this gets ported soon myself, but alas I have no knowledge of Visual C.

I was thinking it might help a bit if you could tell us all what would be needed to make a plug.

Like are you wanting the plug to import all data during runtime, or would it have all images imported as sprites beforehand?

I know the tool outputs everything to an xml, and images to a folder, but Construct is not set up to create completely new objects, so there has to be either a dummy to load to, or a way to simplify the rigging set up.

Not sure a plug can do that easily.

Very good! did not think that it is possible to Constructs, great!

newt,

Although it would be awesome if the extension could load in and swap XML's at runtime, it would also be fine for most games if it could only do so within the construct frame editor.

So, the absolute necessities are:

1) it could load in the XML file that you assign it to.

2) It would either pre-load all the images from all the folders into its own data "bank" or be able to do so at load time of a frame. (both would be great, but if necessary the first option only)

3) You could assign a "character" from my tool's XML to a standart construct sprite. It would become a "child" of the construct sprite.. and copy its rotation, position, general opacity etc... In theory, the standard construct sprite would not only be used to control the "characters" basic stuff AND could be used as a basic full body collision (such as a rectangle for a platformer engine)

3) It would allow for changing and keeping track of the animation that is playing in the character.

4) It would keep track of that Characters variable and per frame variable changes

5) It would handle detection of colisions between colision rectangles between that character and any other character assigned to any other construct sprites.

6) it would also keep track of the XML's action points for such uses as spawing bulettes and anchoring other sprites at that actionpoints location.

The Spriter Beta's been updated to 0.6:

http://www.brashmonkey.com/