Sprites Don't Grow on Trees

Just a little update from before. My black circles are now a sprite. looking nicer now. although it's so hard to line them out to give out that illusion of this thing moving. it can actually be achieved by using the following layering technique.. Instead of slicing and placing individual masks on to their appropriate place, I just use the entire sprite sheet, and cover the places I don't want user to see with a masking layer, and create a new movie clip (the shadow) as a hitbox ( so other objects on the sprite doesn't actually activate if it hit something).

And for the actual Sprite editing, I'm using a free program called ASEPRITES. it's pretty awesome. at first, i was gonna use Photoshop, but for some reason, my tablet doesn't really want me to do this project, so I just search for alternative. The program's quite good actually. they have similar functions as Photoshop such as... ya know, layers, horizontal flip and things.

Sprite editing is hard. They didn't teach this in class. I mean.. well I do learn how to draw in drawing class. but when working with actual single pixels, there's no right way to do it. I mean, it's just either it looks good, or it looks bad.

 

and then I've done a bit of programming to determine where does the sprite going / heading, so the mask later stops at the right place . if _x is positive, the the sprite is facing right, if it's negative, it's going left. same goes with y axis. Things like this just clicks once you sit down and actually doing the stuff.

So.. no more boring stuffs. Time to see this in action... and here goes. check out the flash below. ( ignore the version number, forgot to edit.. blergh.

The next thing on the agenda will be, to make these townspeople wear some clothes. and it'll be boring to make the wear the same clothes.  I have to randomize them . and to do so, I'll have to include another later of sprites on top of the one before... and one more layer for pants, and one more layer for hairs.

Good thing I can just make one shirt, and adjust the colours, and automatically get 7 variant of it. here's some of the things I'll be posting on my next post.