Novice animation software? Use the one in Game Maker's image editor. That's what I've always used. It's the best I've found so far. Easy, useful, and has a lot of things to make sprites look better. :)

Edit: I would suggest using it with Spriter. Spriter seems to open up a lot of doors to ANIMATION where you have to separately edit each frame of an animation in Game Maker. If you're wanting to make good looking sprites it's still useful though. And so is the one inside PixieEngine. I tend to go on there often and make some really cool sprites just for the heck of it. It's got a symmetric brush that draws the same on both sides. I'm currently making a Texture creator with the same idea in mind, just instead of just being symmetric on the X axis it will also be Y depending on the user's preferences and also it works through alpha brushes that can snap to certain positions of the grid and if the brush goes out of the image boundaries the part that is cut off is set to the other side of the image. It's coming out quite nice. :)

It'd be greatly appreciated if someone could please explain how to do this. I am also using the free version of Construct 2 and would like to make a game a 2D Minecraft. I have previously posted this, actually. There needs to be more feedback. I've already got a pretty wicked generating scheme that works well, but it makes to many instances and overloads decent computers. It doesn't lag bad when the maps are small, but if I try to generate a large map it takes more than five to ten minutes.

If someone can help us out, thank you!

Hello, I am Chad Wolfe, the founder of an indie game designing team known as Kiira. I am currently working on a game called Build Social.

   Build Social is much like Minecraft. Build, go on online servers and build more. Build Social will have a lot more items though, and I've already got that mostly figured out. I'm excelling greatly in the simplicity of Construct 2.

   Though, I have been quite confused lately. :P To my disappointment, I've not been able to figure out a way around this.

   Just like any other game, I have been stuck with the problem of too many instances at same time in the game. I went through code after code, I looked for many different ways to store the X and Y positions and create the object once it's X and Y coordinates are within the view port. Then, destroy it again once it's outside the view port.

   I want this to repeat, but I can't even find out where to start. I figured Arrays would be the best choice, but I can't store numerous instances of one Sprite in different positions. Though, I have found out how to do it with one instance of a SINGLE sprite.

   I would greatly appreciate it if someone could help me with this! Thanks in advance, Kiira.