Dino's new animations #6

Some insight into the way I work with animation sheets.

Iterating with an artist over a sprite sheet can be really hard if you don't have a proper methodology in place. At first I used to incorporate the new animations myself because I haven't proposed any structure to the game sheets.

Bear in mind that the order of each animation is important because that is translated into a JSON file and then fed to the game's logic. If you switch or misplace by 1 pixel something then it will look weird on the canvas.

What happens when you misplace the offsets of you animations in the sprite sheet.

The key take-away here is to setup and agree a workflow that is easy for you and the artist(s) to iterate.
You could:

  • provide a template with placeholders (eg. Idle animations 6 frames of 64x64)

  • provide guidelines about maximum width and height a sprite can be

  • specify if the shadow of the character needs to be separately (or on a separate layer)

  • leave the artist free to self-organize, don't micromanage as the changes can prove to be costly (time, money, effort)

Using GitHub issues

For some reason Youtube's algorithm thinks that my video is about Roblox.

Here is the full game dev video log: