Hello everyone, Snow7L here!
So as a part of my final project for my "Development of Gaming and Mobile Apps" class, I created some graphics for a couple boss characters. This is one of them--a giant, battle damaged, flying toaster. (I thought a few of you might get a kick out of it.) It's just one sprite from the whole sheet.
If you're interested in creating your own 2D sprites, I have a couple of pointers to hopefully help you out. Whatever you have in mind to make, I always suggest people start with an outline of the character first, don't worry about shading and colors until the outline looks good. In fact, I say animate and compare the outlines you make to each other before coloring them in. At this stage of development, it's easier to change the little things you find then if you add in everything else on top of it. When you're happy with what you see, then you can add in the basic colors of the parts of the body...
This sort of thing can be a bit difficult to explain. There's a great basics tutorial by Kiwi at 2dwillneverdie.com about the same thing. Just look for the tutorial, "A Basic Sprite Tutorial."
...And if you want a good gif animator to test your sprites out on, I'd suggest the Beneton Movie Gif Maker, available at benetonsoftware.com.
I've been using this for years and it works if you know the little quirks it has. A few quick notes: if you like to save out projects and load them in a lot, don't use a transparent background. It tends to read in the delay times wrong by one slide, so try to keep your delays the same per slide to avoid huge issues. And also, it works best to install it somewhere in your documents folder, instead of your programs folder.
Anyhow, I hope someone out there gets a kick out of the sprite. I know a bunch of people at my college sure did.
EDIT: It's been a while! Since I last posted this, it's come to my attention that some time recently, the installer you can download from Beneton Software for Beneton Movie Gif Maker's has been compromised with Malware. No idea what's up with that. Much as I hate to say it, it's probably best to avoid downloading that software from the developer's website for now. Note that it's just the installer from their website presently--if you downloaded/installed it before the virus hit, then your pre-virus version of the installer will be good. I have no idea when the virus got in there though. (You'll notice if your version is infected if you're asked a bunch of personal questions in the installer, like what your income is, address, etc. It's so weird, I'll tell you...)
Instead, I'd probably recommend GraphicsGale by HUMANBALANCE Ltd. It's now completely free, so you can use the full set of tools (which includes animation tools). Note it will take some time to learn the user interface, but you can literally make sprites and edit them in Gale, not just animate them. It's a really useful tool, so I'd recommend it. Especially with the issue going on with Beneton...
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