Part 2: The First Frame

Anyway, onto actually making the animation. What we are going to do is create individual still images of each part of the animation. Each image is called a frame.

That right there is my first frame of Kelik, an original character of mine. He’s standing. I call it my standing frame, AKA an idle frame. He’s not doing anything. He’ll be in this position at the beginning and end of battles, as well as when he gets hit, and just while he isn’t doing anything. It’s also the base frame I use for every other frame. So it’s important.

How did I get this frame? Well, I do everything in MS Paint, personally. To start, you need a 248x160 image. 248x160 means the width is 248 and the height is 160. The reason why is because the GBA screen is 240x160 pixels. The extra 8 pixels in the width is where you can put your battle palette.

So I open MS Paint and make my image with dimensions 248x160.

Then, I fill in my image some color that has a very, very low chance of being a color in my battle palette. Since Kelik is not green, I’ll put in green.

Okay, that’s really all you should have now. Next, we put in our sprite. Now, we want our sprite to fit in with the battle background, platforms, template, and other animation. So we want to make sure its feet are at the right level.

It’s hard to see, but at the bottom-right it shows the co-ordinates of the pixel I am hovering over (which you also can’t see, but my invisible cursor is at the bottom-left of his left foot, our point of view). It says “143,101”, which is about right. The near foot should be about 100 pixels down. The body should start showing up about 140 pixels to the right. Granted, if you have a bigger sprite, you might need to make some adjustments.

What you must do is paste your sprite and then position it in that general area to get a good alignment. Generally if the left foot is at about (142,100) you should be good, but there’s no specific rule.

By the way, an important feature you should know how to use is the opacity/transparent control feature of MS Paint, which is to the left. When using the select tool, you can make a color transparent, or see-through. The default color to be see-through is white; however, you can right-click any color on the image and make that the transparent color. You’ll know it’s the transparent color because it’ll show up as the other color at the far-left of the color box at the top of MS Paint. For example, if I right-clicked green (which is the background, so it should be transparent), the color box would look like this:

The transparent color is circled in orange.

However, your toolbox must also have the appropriate setting on for that color to be transparent:

Do you see the blue-highlighted box at the bottom? The top one will make the background color (green) opaque, as in, it won’t be transparent. If you click the bottom box, the color WILL be transparent. It’s that simple.

Anyway, back to making the frame. You should have something like this, but with your own sprite:

Next is an optional part. I highly suggest you do it. I call it palette preparing. You see, FEditor Adv can automatically detect your 16 color palette for you, but sometimes, it just kinda acts silly and messes up. Other times, you may want to have a specific order to your palette, e.g., if the animation you are inserting is a Pegasus knight with axes, and you want it to be compatible (palette-wise) with the lance Pegasus Knight animation. If you don’t care for this, you can skip it, but don’t blame me if your palette acts weird later.