pixeljoint.com

and

wayofthepixel.net/pixelation/index.php

by far the two best places to learn about pixel ary and to recruit the best pixel artists.

To reiterate and make even more incredible the potential for file and v-ram savings here's some other things to consider:

1)Using Char-maps (a built in feature of Spriter) you can swtich out the body part images of a fully animated character to not only make diferent variations of the same character (diferent armor, weapons etc) BUT you can also use it to create entirely diferent characters.

2) This doesnt just allow for massive savings of V-ram and file space, it also allows for MASSIVE savings of TIME. An artist can create or change fully animated characters many magnitudes faster than drawing each frame by hand...and imagine if you want to change the design of a characters head...instead of editing it in hundreds of frames by hand, you simple change the 1 (or very few) head images that Spriter uses in all the frames.

3) Lastly, in combination with the art packs I (and other artists) will be making, It will finally allow for non-artist indie game makers to very easily customize professionally animated 2d game art for use in their own game...or, if you are paying an artist to customize your character, you might now be paying for hours of work instead of months!

Hi Jim15,

I'll let Lucid answer in more technical details, but:

The whole point of Spriter is to not only let artists make highly optimized animations as quickly and easily as possible, to but to also allow artists and game designers to have very natural, visual ways to control other aspects of game play... This is why it allows for the placement of multiple "action points", collision rectangles, sound effects, and variable changes at any given frame of an animation.

It is meant to be the dream tool(one of them...I'm planning on a level editor as well) for 2d game makers.

Short answer to game engine implimentation, YES, with Lucid's Spriter plug-in for Construct (and eventually Construct 2) ALL variable changes, action points, sounds, and collision rectangles AND Character maps will be super easy to detect and manipulate within Construct!

Similar plug-ins to FULLY Support Spriter files are being worked on (but are not as far along) for Unity3d, Torque 2d and at least one other game authoring system at this time.

Thanks again for your support to all of you who have already purchased the current version of Spriter :)

Please help spread the word, because the more sucessful Spriter becomes, the more agressively we can evolve it AND begin work on the Level Editor. (Similar dreamy goodness as Spriter, but for designing levels...and with complete Spriter support as well of course ;) )

Any program you're confortable using, so long as it exports PNGs you're all set. :)

For those who missed it, the current version of Spriter can be found here:

http://www.brashmonkey.com

Yes, You'll get v1.x for free. Thanks for supporting our efforts.

I'm not sure how much the art packs will be...it depends on how long they take to make, and how robust they end up...I'll almost certiantly release free, less robust ones to Spriter owners to help get them started.

The art packs are still at least a couple months away though.

As soon as the new Spriter is tested and proven stable enough for daily use (which I'm sure won't take long knowing Lucid), I'm going to try and comission other pro artists to create art packs as well.. And of course, ANY artist is welcome to create art packs themselves to sell or give away freely without any obligations to us. If an artists makes a really high quality art pack, we'd be happy to help market it through what will become our official web-sites and marketting system. (whatever that becomes)

Don't forget, not only will Spriter make the process of creating animations and character variations drastically faster, but it will also drastically optimize the amount of file space, memory usage, etc. (That is once the nearly finished Construct Classic Spriter plug-in is finished)

Now that Lucid has taken over the programming aspect of Spriter, I'll be creating entire 2d game art packs (fuly animated). These will be Spriter files along with all the images required for the animations.   This will alow for super easy customizations of professionally animated game assets.

I'll also create new (starting from scratch)tutorials as soon as the new Spriter is up and running enough to do so.

Then there's the plug-ins that will be made in the future like the one for "Spriter" which will add a lot of extra functionality to CC and will make it much easier for multiple people to work on one project at once.

I hope to some day make a really nice tile-map level editor too..which will hopefully get a CC plug-in

Yup...But I wanted to do things "right" so I made Spriter so that I could make lots more animations and actually have a drastically smaller file space and memory requirements.

The game is a very long term project/labor of love.

that would be a similar effect yes.. Spriter just allows for a robust interface and exact per frame control, as well as visually placing collision rectangles, action points, sounds, and variable changes per frame.

You don't need the alpha EXPORT feature to use the Spriter plug-in. The spriter plug-in will automatically recreate the animations with alpha.

The only limit to the free version of Spriter regarding Alpha is that if you export animations as sequential images, you can only do so as BMP, which is a format that doesnt support alpha channels.... the Spriter plugin will be using the images (like body parts) you create which will be png and have full alpha support.

I hope that makes sense.

Thank you Lucid. It's an honor to have such a fantastic extension programmer helping to make Spriter work with Construct.

Other games of note that use similar methods are Odin Sphere for the ps2, all the Rayman 2d games, vector man games for the Genisis and lots of others.

In general, once Spriter files are supported for Construct (and other game authoring systems) it will alow people to save huge amounts of file size, ram, and TIME... and suddenly things like characters who's appearance change with power-ups, new weapons, armor etc is an absolute breeze, super painless to do, and also takes almost no additional memory.

Spriter is by no means perfect yet.. but its shaping up nicely and already at this early stage is quite useable and offers some great benifits.

I'll make some new step by step tutorials for breaking up and animating a character as soon as I can. (that, bug fixes and improvements to the useability are top priorities)

fixed. thanks