Animations Update

Now that the game includes a jump command, I needed to come up with a jumping animation. This only really requires two new sprites: one for the ascent and one for descent. This is what I came up with:

This so far has been fairly tricky to implement, because the sprites need to be timed to various parts of the jump rather than simply looping at a certain speed. I’ve atleast got the ascending and descending sprites in place for now.

Now that there are quite a few sprite sequences in my game, it’s very important that they are correctly aligned according to the engine, so that the transition between sprites is smooth and doesn’t offset the image. I discovered today that the origin of my sprites were not in the correct centre, so turning from left to right sometime meant strange collisions with walls or unpredicted jumping about!

This is the origin for my main character animation (shown visually by the black cross!). The canvas size is 70×70 pixels, which I’ve tried to keep consistent with most sprites so that the origin is always exactly the same. With animations which span a wider area such as the “cosy” animation, the canvas is much wider. The origin is always in the centre of the character, not the canvas.

Each sequence must also have a collision mask, which maps the solid part of the image where collisions are concerned. This is the collision mask for the main character animation:

Automatically, the collision mask is set to “precise”, which masks the precise outline of the image excluding any alpha. For me, this would include the tail and other protruding parts. It is advised to avoid including these parts to avoid getting caught on walls etc. I’ve actually made mine very small, covering only the main body part. This is also consistent throughout every sprite.