If all goes well, your guy should be standing, kinda like this.

And that’s all the sprite should be doing, because you only have one frame. If it’s just doing that, and it’s looking hella boring, that’s great news. We can now go on and make every other frame. If there are some issues, we gotta fix them.

The main issue that comes to mind with this is the palette issue. You see, a custom battle animation has its own palette. You can force a character to use that class’s battle animation’s palette by setting their palette in the character editor to “0x00”. Look:

You see the blue box? It’s set to “0x00” because this character has a custom animation. The animation we are inserting has the palette for us, so we don’t need to assign the character another palette. This may or may not be the case for your animation.

If it’s another problem, I can’t be a psychic and predict and address it here, so I suggest posting on a forum or something to get some help with it. Make sure to post your animation script and the frame (and possibly a patch that lets one test the animation quickly or a screenshot showing what it looks like) or else there’s no way to really tell what the might problem be.

Anyway, back to the ideal situation—everything works. Now we exit out of FEditor and Nightmare and go back to that standing frame in MS Paint.

Part 3: Making the Rest of Your Frames

Looking good, kinda. Now, we have to make the rest of the frames. You can start with whatever mode you want—attack, critical, range, range critical, or dodge, but ultimately, every time you do a new animation mode (a part of the animation), you should start with the standing image.

Now, if you already know how to animate images, this is going to be a piece of cake. If not, well, it’ll take some practice and tweaking to get right, but have patience.

You need to copy the sprite from your sprite sheet and paste it onto MS Paint. Using the transparency feature of MS Paint which I explained a while ago is quite useful.

Can you see how the selection of Kelik I copied over has some green, and that green is covering over the old Kelik? It’s really hard to position my new pose over the old pose like that. So I turn on transparency, and wala:

Now I can drag him around until I get him to align with the last sprite. In this case, he’s only supposed to move his chest/head while dodging (because he’s slick like that). Since his feet aren’t moving, I can position the feet of this new pose over the feet of his old pose.

Wait, I can still see his old pose hiding behind there! Yeah, that’s a problem. That’s why once you align the new sprite/new pose over the old one, you can change the transparency mode to make it un-transparent, which will get rid of the old sprite. You should see what I mean:

(Notice how transparency is turned off using the box on the left toolbar)

Okay, we have another frame set-up. But it’s still called “standing”.png. That’s a problem. Using file->save as, save it as something else. Since this pose happens to be a dodge pose, I’ll call it “dodge1.png”. Thankfully, I’m lazy and I only made one dodge sprite, so there isn’t even a “dodge2.png”. Haha.

Now that I’m done with that animation mode (that was quick), I’ll do another one.

Doing the range mode frames is pretty easy, because chances are, your character won’t have to move much. That is, you don’t have to worry about whether a weapon will actually hit an enemy, and there probably won’t be much feet movement, or jumping, either. My point is, I don’t really have to cover that too much—just put the frames and know that the game will take care of showing the actual spell animation (for example, when the ice tornado forms and the ice block shatters in Fimbulvetr—the game will take care of that for you).

Physical attacks, however, are a bit harder. If you’re a mage, your attack animation and ranged animation are the same. If you’re like Kelik, and you’re a swordsman, your ranged animation is only used for ranged swords, while your attack animation is used for melee (close-up) attacks, so it’s different.

What makes physical attacks harder is just keeping track of the sprite’s movement. You don’t want it too high or too low. Remember, foot level is about 100 pixels down (it’s not some difficult number like 126.38 so no complaining). Your guy’s sprite should start about 140 pixels to the right. And the enemy’s center is typically at about (90,85) so that is where a weapon should slash through or whatever, approximately.

If you look at an actual screenshot of a game (even though this is a hack), you can see that there really isn’t too much space between the two enemies, so keep that in mind.

Here’s a screenshot of one of my attack frames. This is when the enemy is actually being hit.

It’s hard to see as usual, but at the bottom-right is the co-ordinate (92,87), which is ALMOST at what I suggested (the co-ordinate (90,85)). You could check the feet too and see that it’s at about 100 pixels down.

What is the significance of all this info? Why am I telling you? Well, during your attacks, you have to make sure the sprite will actually reach the enemy, but not have its sprite go too far into the enemy, or make it look like your character’s weapon is just BARELY hitting the enemy. Not only that, but you need to make sure that when your character moves back to his/her starting position, they are at the right place—which is why you always use your standing frame as a base to make sure your animation flows smoothly and that all other frames are aligned.

Now, we’re ALMOST done learning about making frames. I know, we haven’t even gotten to the coding, but thankfully coding is easier than this, or at least not as time-consuming.

One important thing I must show you how to do is piercing frames. The first example that comes to mind is a Knight. When he stabs an enemy with his lance, the lance doesn’t just appear right over the enemy sprite. It kinda actually looks like the lance is going through them, even if there is no blood.

This is not the example I was talking about, but whatever—you can see that the thief sprite somewhat covers the General’s spear a little, the point being it looks like the weapon’s going through him. Well, you have to make a special version of a frame for this effect.

This new frame will have a size of 488x160. You may have guessed already: the frame consists of 2 screens, each being 240x160, side-by-side, for a (240x2)x160 or 480x160 image, with an 8 pixel column for the palette, just like before.

Now, I’m gonna have to be a bad kid and switch my example animation to another one, because Kelik, the red-jacketed sword guy I’ve been showing, doesn’t use piercing frames (he slices, doesn’t pierce).

First, this:

Then, this:

(Note: the name ‘a13p’ stands for ‘attack13pierce’, as in, attack frame #13, which is a piercing frame.)

This is actually a very easy-to-do maneuver. The left portion of this frame is everything that DOESN’T pierce. It’s the 240x160 image of everything but the weapon. And the right portion of this frame is the sword; it pierces. If there is an enemy there, the enemy’s sprite will have priority over the sword, making it so that the enemy sprite/body covers the sword. Making it look like the sword went through the sprite… in short, piercing.

Once you set that up, you’re good to go. With piercing frames out of the way, you should now know how to make all your frames for your animation. I need you to do that, so we can FINALLY head on to the next chapter, which will cover animation scripts, and how the game will receive your animation.