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?
maybe advertise for a bit of sprite help in exchange for promoting the artist in the game…like a small banner in the lower right-corner…*shrug*
You could record a photoshop action to re-colorize a sprite, and then play it back over all the frames!
I don’t think they look bad, or boring at all. And with as small as they show on the screen, it is going to be hard to get much more detail and “pop” out of them. YOu may want to make them a bit bigger, more like Civ IV style. Besides, it is really the warrior graphics and animation that people will be looking at.