For week six of Art and Animation, we were asked to make pixel art sprite animations to use in our platformer. These would function as idle and walking animations for the player and idle for the enemies, giving the sprites more life to them so they don’t appear as a flat image on the screen.
Creating The Base Sprites
Before I could start making the actual animations, I needed to design the base sprites for both the player and the enemies. I had planned to have the player character of the game to be a frog and for the enemies to be racoons, so I wanted to make these into cute pixel art sprites. I made all of these 128×128 so the sprites would be a good size for the game, while also making them high quality. I made sure to not just use flat colours when it came to colouring these and shaded them too. I also made each sprite much more vibrant by giving both a colourful shirt design.
Making More Frames
Once I had these base sprites, I duplicated each png four times in Photoshop for each animation. This made the process of making the frames much easier as all I had to do was alter each image slightly to make an animation loop. I first made the idle animation for the player character where the frog bobs up and down and blinks. This animation will play whenever the player isn’t moving so it doesn’t require much movement within the animation itself. For the player walking animation, I repeated the same process but I instead moved the frog’s legs up and down alternatively to show that he will be walking. I also duplicated these frames and flipped them to face the other way so I could have both left and right walking animations. For the enemy idle animation, I once again made its head bob like the frog, but I also flipped the way his arms were facing so it looks like the racoon is flailing its arms as it stands there.
Final Outcomes
This is what my player idle animation looks like when animated. I think that this works better than I originally thought that it would, as I thought that the movements would have been too exaggerated but it was successful in the end.
These are both of the walking animations used in my platformer. I’m glad that when I put the frames together it is very clear that he is walking, as well as the small head bob adding some personality to the sprite.
The animated enemy sprite turned out very well in my opinion. By making its arms wave around in the animation, it almost looks like the player is being taunted by the enemy which wasn’t something I intentionally did, but worked very well nontheless.