TF Flash Game the Second

[monomonkey]

Content-less update. I was working on a doujin translation for another thread for the past few days, but now I can come back to this.

Ok, so while we're waiting for the dialogue to come in, I'll get to work on animating the Bunny stage. In the meantime, I'm taking suggestions for anything.

If you have a sprite you want to see me edit, send it my way. Since I'm not much of an artist, I can't guarantee success with an image that isn't in a 'face forward' pose, but I'll do my best.

If you have an animal/etc you want to see me edit using the current sprite (or in a reply to someone else's sprite), send it my way. I've heard one vote for Frog early in this thread and I'll entertain unique ideas as well (clothes, etc).

If you have a different game you want to see me make instead, send it my way. I can't make promises when it comes to this, but if I like it I'll give it a shot.

My hope for this (and future revisions to this concept) is to keep this thread constant with people writing in for things they want to see me do. I'll be happy to do it. You can think of it like a commission, except I don't claim to be an artist and refuse to take money. My outlook on these things has always been that this is a community, and I'm trying my best to play my own role in this community. Writing and drawing are skills many people have and few people have mastered, but programming is a long road of hard work that many people don't go down, so games in this area are few and far between. I'm attempting to fill that void. The games we do have are great, but I want to add my own contribution to it while I still have time to do so.

[TB Tabby]

Facing-forward sprites, eh? That reminds me: Someone made custom sprite of the battle sprites from Final Fantasy IV that face forward. Perhaps you could do something with Rosa and Rydia? If the creator doesn't mind, of course.

[monomonkey]

Oh, now I remember why I was having problems finding sprites... there was a third requirement: size.

I can't work with small sprites. There's a level of detail that goes completely missing when you're dealing with something 20 pixels tall. The sprite I'm using is several times larger than those.

Besides, if you want to see my edits on those characters, play rb9's game. I did sprite work for him that you'll be able to see in his next update.

Sites like this and this are loaded with sprites, but they're poorly organized. A random sampling of various games across various platforms lead me to believe that a 'face forward sprite with some amount of size and detail' was less common than previously expected, so once I found the Osaka image I stuck with it (plus I like Osaka).

As an aside, is there a reason people in our community like these final fantasy characters so much? I see them in every game... I don't get it. I've never even heard of them >_>

pps - If I sound picky as hell, I apologize. It's because I'm picky as hell.

[Zipper]

Theres another option here, but it requires more out sourcing... Is a WIP image or something.
I'm not a programer, but I wounder if that will help or hinder. That or like how you allowed custom scripts, what about custom images?

[monomonkey]

First of all, what's a WIP? =x

Second of all, custom dialogue is one thing, but I have absolutely no idea how I could enable custom images. I mean, I could let you import your own images, but they wouldn't be animated. I edit the sprites and save each part individually and stack them on top of one another, but once I import them into Flash, I change them into Movie Clips and animate them. Importing your own images just means you can put the stack together and change which ones are visible based on the matches.

[ytytyt]

Originally Posted by monomonkey

First of all, what's a WIP? =x

Second of all, custom dialogue is one thing, but I have absolutely no idea how I could enable custom images. I mean, I could let you import your own images, but they wouldn't be animated. I edit the sprites and save each part individually and stack them on top of one another, but once I import them into Flash, I change them into Movie Clips and animate them. Importing your own images just means you can put the stack together and change which ones are visible based on the matches.

WIP means Work In Progress. And for using custom images you could do GIFs if that's possible. GIFs can be animated.

[monomonkey]

I'm still not sure if I understand properly. What does a work in progress have to do with getting a sprite facing forward...?

As for using animated GIFs, I could try but I'm not sure if it'll be as good as what Flash does.

[ytytyt]

Originally Posted by monomonkey

I'm still not sure if I understand properly. What does a work in progress have to do with getting a sprite facing forward...?

I don't know. :P

As for using animated GIFs, I could try but I'm not sure if it'll be as good as what Flash does.

Probably not but it's at least one way you might be able to let people make custom stuff. Plus it's easier for people to make animated GIFs and there's a lot of programs for doing it.

[cpt soban]

Originally Posted by ytytyt

I don't know. :P


Probably not but it's at least one way you might be able to let people make custom stuff. Plus it's easier for people to make animated GIFs and there's a lot of programs for doing it.

The problem then is that people would have to make an enormous number of gifs. for example, the tail growing card, you would have to have a gif for that happening when the rest of the sprite has fur, when it doesnt, when it has paws, when it doesnt, when it has paws and fur, when it doesnt have fur but has paws. you see where I've gone with this?

Now maybe some images that can be stuck onto the existing sprite but with higher detail, like some shading on the tail or ears.

[Zipper]

Sorry, posting while tired leads to these things. I ment a vector type image, like what occurs in Illustrator or Flash.

I know the sprites are stacked, but theres gotta be easyer ways to animate in Flash, but sence I'm noob at it, I know not what they are

[monomonkey]

There is an easier way to animate in Flash, and that's the way. You draw the image in Flash first and edit it from there.

If I had any artistic ability whatsoever, I would do that. Sorry to say that I don't. I've earnestly tried to learn how to draw and I just can't do it. I can edit images using a basic tracing technique (aka when I do these I just google the animal and leave the image up next to the image-editing window) but outside of that I'm lost.

I'll explain the basic process that goes into making one of these.

You start by thinking about what animal you want to draw and what components could fit onto a card. To use all twelve cards, I decided to make hands and feet two separate things, along with most facial features. It's a cop-out, but it was my only choice.

Then you make a layer for each of these things in your editing program and leave the base image on the bottom. Then just draw them on top of one another until you have a full image.

Save each part alone as a PNG and import them into Flash. Convert the images to Movie Clips and give them a name. On the first frame, use stop() to make sure they don't play and _visible=false to make sure you can't see them. Since I knew I would want to use a check sometimes to see if another part had been triggered or not, I also made global variables for each part name and change them to another value when they're triggered. That way I can do a check like I do for the Spots on the cow that tells me if the arm and/or leg has triggered or not.

When you make a pair, you reverse those previous commands (use play() and _visible=true).

That's it for the code. As for the animating itself, I basically just take the image, break it apart so it's a Shape, erase almost all of the invisible area, and let Flash do a Shape Tween on it using a small piece of leftover invisible area on one keyframe and the full piece of the leftover part in the other (so for the paw I erase all but a big box around the paws and then copy that, move it down the animation line, and erase all but the very top of that box on the first frame). Flash handles the rest.

Since I've altered the basic code significantly, it only takes a matter of an hour or two to draw up the animations themselves (though it took significantly longer for the Cow because I had a bunch of unique sprites to animate, such as spots with no new appendages, spots with new arms, spots with new legs, and spots with both). The difficult coding and proper stacking take up some of the other time if it's a complicated project (as the "growing" phase of the Cow animation was--that took literally 5 hours to do).

All in all, from getting the image concept ready to planning out what parts will be on cards to drawing the image to editing my Flash file to accomodate the new animation to testing and re-testing to make sure it all works, it takes about 5-10 hours. Honestly not too bad.

Now that all of that mess is out of the way...

If any of you happen to have images that you think fit into this category (aka a before and after image in the same pose that I can break apart into multiple pieces), I wouldn't mind working with it. I'm also still taking any suggestions for things you want to see, regardless of what it is (aka, it doesn't have to be an animal). As for what I'm currently on, I went back and looked at my bunny image and realized I didn't like it anymore so I'm re-working it.

[ytytyt]

Originally Posted by cpt soban

The problem then is that people would have to make an enormous number of gifs. for example, the tail growing card, you would have to have a gif for that happening when the rest of the sprite has fur, when it doesnt, when it has paws, when it doesnt, when it has paws and fur, when it doesnt have fur but has paws. you see where I've gone with this?

Now maybe some images that can be stuck onto the existing sprite but with higher detail, like some shading on the tail or ears.

GIFs support transparency so you could stack animated GIFs if you wanted. As long as the original sprite is smaller and doesn't change position it'd work fine. Or if the original sprite is bigger you could let it be swapped out for when it needs to have no shoes or something like that. You could do a really big number of GIFs too if you really wanted to handle it that way but then it's mostly just a lot of copy-paste so it's still not a huge issue, it's just really tedious. Stacking is still easier though.

EDIT: Come to think of it you could probably do different parts as separate GIFs (like legs are one, body is one, arms are one and that sort of thing) and just swap them out with th animations when they happen. So then the original GIF doesn't need to be stacked under because you can just replace them in parts and have all the different GIFs stacked on top of each other. It would probably be a bit more complicated to code and you'd have to work harder to make the sprites line up but it would work out better and you could allow for bigger changes.

Definitely could have GIFs and have them work as long as Flash works with them and lets you stack them and stuff though.