animation is hard
a painful part of making a video game is that i have to… well, animate one. making a single frame pixel art sprite or tile is one thing, but just to make a character turnaround that takes 8 frames! and just to walk in one direction, that’s another 7 frames. so in total, just to make her walk around i have to animate 64 different frames. that doesn’t sound as bad as it really is so i’ll put it this way… it takes almost 70 different drawings to make a sprite that can walk around. and then another 70 to make her run! i knew it would be a lot of work, but i really bit off more than i can chew with this one.
the sprite you see here is actually an older version of hazel. as i’m writing this, i have a much larger animation project looming over my head, and that is creating a playable sprite. i’ve only been doing pixel art seriously for a year or two, and animation is something that i can’t seem to get the hang of. it’s taken a long time, i burn myself out working on it, perfecting every pixel.
looking back on this sprite, there is so much wrong with it. i’ll give myself some credit considering it was my first 8 direction character turnaround, but i’m not sure how or why i gave this the greenlight. it’s cute and gets the point across but when i see her spin around i just cringe!!
the new and improved version is on the way and i am very excited to share her with you. i’ve spent over 20 hours on the new 8 directional walking sprite, and i’m very close to being done. right now it’s just a body, and not a character but in the future i’d like to make our playable character be customizable!
hopefully i can finish the new version soon so you can all see it IN THE GAME! the best part is going to be the moment we plug her in and can walk around the levels. so please, stay tuned and that’s all folks!
