Okay, while I love how the units in Planitia look, I hate the fact that they aren’t animated. This makes it tough to figure out exactly what a unit is supposed to be doing.

Unfortunately, I Are No Artist, and the selection of sprites on the internet that have a walk animation and face in eight directions is rather limited. I started by ripping sprites out of Powermonger, which worked but they are just so darn pixelated.

My friend Ryan suggested I try one of Reiner’s tilesets.

Now, I’ll be frank. I don’t really like Reiner’s sprites simply because they look so mundane. The sprites I’ve got are colorful! They’re retro! People seem to like them! And they don’t animate.

But I went ahead and gave it a go. I used the farmer set on this page.

Here’s how it turned out.

Note that farmers now face the direction they walk in and have a two-frame walk cycle (the sprite set has an eight-frame walk cycle in each direction, but I only implemented two as a test).

Short of suckeri…er, finding another artist willing to do an eight-way walk cycle for me for free, this is the only way I’ll get animated sprites into the game. What do you guys think?