For particularly large sprites, it's probably not a bad idea to make 3D models first, then animate and paint over them. It's a lot of work but at least your characters will be anatomically correct, which can be difficult without reference.

As for the animation itself, I dunno..I've always found it to be pretty easy to figure out how something should move. If you really have to, make a "skeleton" or wireframe of the character animation first, then draw over it. It will be easier to tweak that way.

Another "trick" is to make your entire animation in a small amount of frames, and then add "tween frames" to smooth it out. I do that a lot, especially for walking animations.

Mike Judge once said "If you're going to be an animator, you should probably take physics classes"...or something like that..It's really not a bad idea. Learning physics can teach you how things should move and interact in the real world. Crappy example, but think of a rubber ball. It doesn't just hit the ground and bounce, it flattens out as it comes into contact with the ground, then turns into a sort of oval and moves upwards. Only when it's back in the air does it go back to its normal shape. It will probably jiggle a bit afterwards, too. A good animator will take this into account, and probably exaggerate the shaping of the ball, and maybe even add some dust particles or lines/dashes to show the ball is moving at high speeds.

Yep.

Hi I'm Matt and I develop games with my buddies Betatronic and Jerom-BD. I mostly program and design games but I occasionally do the music and art as well. My latest project was Minitroid but it really sucks and you shouldn't play it.

Have a good day.

Auto Flip & Point Sampling don't appear to be working when using WebGL. Graphics are blurry and my player flips upside down, but oddly as if its hotspot was in the middle, not the bottom.

Also, if the browser's zoom is greater than ~200 the page size seems to infinitely grow - scroll bars appear on the right and bottom of the page and get smaller and smaller. The page goes back to its normal size when zooming back out.

There was also a black square in the middle of the screen but it disappeared. Assuming the border was misaligned.

Also, sprite font freezes the game, but I think Mipey said he's looking into that.

Using Chrome, latest version, GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D enabled.

This was also brought up in the other thread but I guess I'll post again since you have a .cap that can demonstrate this..

If you change one of the moving platform's sinewave behavior to horizontal you'll notice some other problems as well.

1) If you're being pushed to the left you will have a hard time jumping (I guess you get stuck in the platform a bit)

2) If you're being pushed to the right, your player will 'hop'. If you hold left while being pushed to the right, the player sometimes 'climbs' over the platform.

This has nothing to do with the collision mask on the sprite - the same thing happens in my game with a rectangular collision mask. Also, this happens with any moving platform, not just ones using the sinewave behavior.

This didn't happen in CC though :< I understand they're different engines but the current one does seem a little wonky.

It also doesn't work very well with moving platforms; the player's Y position doesn't keep up vertical ones, and if you move against a horizontal one the player moves upwards and sometimes ends up on the top of the platform.

Also the "push-out" mechanic seems to only work to some extent. If the player gets smashed by a moving platform and he's near the edge, he'll be pushed out, but if he's near the middle of the platform he'll get stuck. Not a big deal, really, but I thought I should mention it.

Can atleast the moving platform problems be looked into?

<img src="http://i369.photobucket.com/albums/oo136/4Sweet2Leaf0/Bumper_Screenshot.png" border="0" />

WIP screenshot of my entry for the primary competition, blown up 2x. Graphics by Betatronic and Jerom-BD. Doubt we can finish it in a month but we'll try!

Ah. Yeah that's all it was! I figured all layers were transparent by default. I already had a partly transparent background in the above layer, so it made it look like the bottom layer was going behind the white space XD;

Thanks.

Same thing happens here and in the platformer examples so er..I think it's just unfinished?

I've been using 4 layers in my game but I decided to add one more for parallaxing backgrounds. However, all objects in this 5th layer appear to be BEHIND the layout itself. Yes, the white empty space that is the layout is in front of this layer.

I read that you can only use 4 layers in the free version, is this what happens when you go over the limit? If so, I'm not using the free version sooo....bug?

Well, they're semi-transparent.

edit: Nevermind, the auto-transparent border has nothing to do with this. That was just the first thing that came to mind for some reason.. Anyway, the transparent borders were caused by the objects' sizes being decimal numbers (they were being scaled by 60*dt), and the blurry text was fixed by setting the spritefont's Resize Mode to fixed size. Sorry about that! Delete this topic if you want..

Is there any way to disable the 1px transparent border that's added when cropping sprites? It looks awful on low-res graphics! I imported a sprite strip for the spritefont plugin, and some squares for a nifty transition, and they all have transparent borders :<

edit: Actually I didn't even crop these sprites..I just imported a sprite strip for the character map, and dragged the square image into the layout editor, but the border was added anyway.

+Player is falling

-Add 60*dt to instance variable 'fall length'

+Player is on ground

   +'fall length' > some good distance

   -Kill player

   +'fall length' < some good distance

   -set 'fall length' to 0

Should work just fine if there are no abilities that allow the player to float or something. Might also want to set 'fall length' back to 0 if there's a wall kick or something.