Iterative Design on bug wings

I always find that one of the toughest things about sprites is getting them to look just right, and especially for animations. An example is this flying wasp-thing I made the other day:

Bzzzzz

There are a surprising amount of choice in how you can animate this. The way the wings move in all three animations are based on things I have seen done similarly in the past, but its always a bit of personal preference as to which style fits best. I like the first one the most but it certainly wasn't the one I originally tried (in fact they made in order from right to left).

Moving Pixels

Animating is hard, so I thought I'd go through what I do when creating sprite animations. Sprite work is great because although it takes a while, the results are really nice looking. And who doesn't like a bit of retro. In this case I tried to make a simple 3 combo attack animation as seen in many platforming fighter games like Henry Hatsworth and the Megaman games.

Creating a simple reference sprite is really useful to work with because it really reminds you of the proportions and ratios everything as you create each frame - something I've always had a problem with. To help deal with this I tend to begin animations with really simple stick figure. Stick figures are also great for prototyping ideas in your head and getting the right poses due to their nature of being really easy to draw. It also helps to have seen all those stick man fighting animations like the Xiao Xiao series.

This choreograph is loosely based on a similar series of attacks used by the games mentioned above.