Evening! Hope you’re all doing well, washing your hands and successfully staving off the utter boredom of isolation. I’ve been on a bit of a roll today with my sprites and animation so thought I’d make a quick post about it.

As I’ve mentioned before, my pixel art skills are old shit on a stick, so it’s a part of game design that sort of looms over me. As satisfied as I get when a particularly tricky block of code finally comes together, there’s always a nagging little voice in the back of my head saying “You’ve got to do sprites and animation at some point, you know. It’s going to be difficult and gruelling and you’ll probably just do little bits here and there to spread out the pain.” But not today.

Up until this afternoon, I only had a few bits of player art:

A walk cycle…

Half of a run cycle and a neutral pose for when the player’s standing still…

Well in the last few hours I went hammer and tongs and finished my run cycle…

Different sitting/crouching poses for when you’re charging a jump…

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Which admittedly is quite similar to the new idle animation…

A jumping sprite…

A diving sprite…

And a few underground sprites for when you land a jump and dive for food…

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I’m feeling pretty bloody good! Could they be more complex? Definitely and maybe one day they will be, but for now they’re perfectly serviceable. This thing’s almost starting to look like a game.

That’s all I really wanted to show off today. I’ve played with the jump mechanics a bit more and added a sound to let you know when you reach one of the jumping power levels and I’ve also made a little indicator for the food spot that you can see without debug mode on, which is useful. That last one’s probably a temporary fix and I think I’ll eventually go for something a bit more subtle, but who knows. Here’s a little demo of everything in action:

Thoughts and advice are welcome, as always. Have a great weekend, evade the boredom, wash those little flesh mittens and stay safe.

Cheers,

Dave