Can A.S. aid w/ char. design? Don't want 2 draw 900 sprites!

JDOG82 · Post by **JDOG82** » Sat May 30, 2009 4:42 am

For a year now I have been writing a game script based on vampires, clowns, (touches on fear of clowns aka Coulrophobia) and other things that go bump in the dark. The story takes place in Mexico and Spain yada, yada and deals with the struggle of good vs evil. Anyway I wasn't sure how to get this story into something "real" until I came across Anime Studio and this game. glove on fight http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnx6bYh5EXk Basically from using the A.S. demo and looking at this game something gave me the idea to have a version of my story to be a fighting game such as a Capcom puzzle fighter. Since I have developed for the iphone before, I want to make a darkstalkers/chibi/anime type of game based on my work for that os. I wanted to know if any of the vets of A.S. know would it be possible to create my characters and ALL their animations for my project using Anime Studio? I wanted to see if I could us A.S. to speed up the designing of the characters (who will probably look like morbid versions of the ones in the link) I wanted to (if possible) avoid drawing individual sprites for all the characters; which would be 10 chars for the game. I hope the answer is yes, since I have a physics engine that I want to implement into the game that will be awesome (not sure if anyone knows of the katamari series but the engine that I have developed would allow characters to afflict damage to each other which can break the other persons armor into pieces that can be stuck to other fighters character to build new and different armor-hope its not confusing but believe me it will be awesome.) Thabks for reading my ramblings and I appreciate all for reading my post!

rpc9943 · Post by **rpc9943** » Sat May 30, 2009 5:36 am

humm not sure, just wanted to say that you are a talented game designer...

I think you can do what you want... but i am so new to AS i wouldnt know..

RonC

slowtiger · Post by **slowtiger** » Sat May 30, 2009 9:32 am

I'm not an expert in game programming, but I have the impression that you want to mix 3 different pieces oft software which is very likely to fail.

A physics engine needs elements it can manipulate, in a format which it understands. I can only think of 3 different approaches to this:
- have a skeleton the engine can manipulate (like 3D)
- have separate body parts in a suitable graphic format the engine will arrange
- have complete characters and movements the engine will just pick from.

I understand that a "sprite" is just a series of bitmaps of the different poses of a character. The poses can be created by AS as separate images, however you'll need some tweaking in Photoshop or Gimp to arrange and put together all the poses in the right way for the sprite to work.

I think you should have a look at the set of possible export formats AS can handle, this should give you an idea of what's useful.

Hope this helps you in your research.

realsnake · Post by **realsnake** » Sat May 30, 2009 4:11 pm

Hello JDog82, I have a very simple example here that might help you.

Note : Animated using IK

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oziuPQmcGdQ

http://ifile.it/qrj43mn (.anme file AS 5.6 ver.)

J. Baker · Post by **J. Baker** » Sat May 30, 2009 4:54 pm

Animestudio is great for creating graphics for games. Below is a sprite sheet. Character was made in AnimeStudio and exported as images. Then in a sprite or graphics editor, it was pieced together to make the sprite sheet. Also, here's a example of the sprite in a test game engine.

Download Sprite Test

Right click on the image and "Save Image As..." if you want the sprite sheet.