WHY DOES ANIMATING SPRITES HAVE TO BE SO FRUSTRATING!!!

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I'm just ranting because I'm animating attacks for my characters and it's frustrating. Ignore this if you want.
Most likely, because you're still (relatively) bad at pixel art and animation frames are EXTREMELY unforgiving of misplaced pixels because they require, to a certain extent, total perfection; a sprite basically has two states it can be in, "properly animated" or "not". There is no in between, there is no "good enough".

But the good news is, you're getting better, which will make it less frustrating with time. Frustration is generally the price paid for grinding your skills, and this is very true of pixel art. So work through the frustration and you will get better and it will be less frustrating as a result.

Unless you're like at me, where you quit anything you're bad at almost immediately, or (in this case) when you've reached the BARE minimum skill level necessary to diddle around some pixels without wanting to chop someone's head in half with a hatchet. But I don't even attempt to make my own sprites from scratch (except for this one time), let alone animate them. I have just enough pixel fiddling ability to get by.
Along with StormCrow's rad words of wisdom and motivation, using a program like GraphicsGale can be helpful since it offers onion skinning and the ability to test the animation in the window!

Or you can be me and cheat by animating the attack in Flash, exporting as a PNG sequence, then making the pixels in your program of choice.
it takes years of practice to even understand basic animation principles and then a whole careers worth if you want to actually understand things like facial expression and emotions.

Final Fantasy was kind of smart for the first couple of games because a lot of the battle sprites were super stylized including the animations themselves. if you don't like animating and you only want to accomplish the bare minimum, it's really worth looking on how you can cut it down and convey the same basic action. If looking flashy and cool is a priority, I would re-examine how important it is to the overall game. Especially if there are a ton of unique animations for each character, and coordinating with whatever system to accomplish them.

tbh the battle animation system in RM in general is atrocious, i've probably spent the most time in that thing more than any other part of RM
seconding that GraphicsGale is fantastic

btw, aside for being great for learning, complex and fluid animations are often less impacting than they seem, and you can achieve almost the same satisfactory feel with a battle system by just using very expressive keyframes / poses, such as in Romancing SaGa 3
By animating the frames themselves (rather than making more frames) you can potentially make very elaborate and satisfying motions with a quite small spritesheet, while you can still make a stiff and unexciting battle system if you make a bunch of really fluidly well animated poses but don't implement these in a good way


because you touch your stylus at night
God I know how unforgiving a single pixel can be. Like trying to animate her idle, her leg is supposed bend a little from breathing, so I have to make sure the boot looks like its still on the leg and i swear to god I had to alter the pixel set up like 50 times in a 3x3 pixel spot. It's so annoying. >o<'

author=meaka
Along with StormCrow's rad words of wisdom and motivation, using a program like GraphicsGale can be helpful since it offers onion skinning and the ability to test the animation in the window!

Or you can be me and cheat by animating the attack in Flash, exporting as a PNG sequence, then making the pixels in your program of choice.

I'm actually using Piskel, it's a great app that's also free, (it also somehow doesnt have ads, but is google sponsored, i dont understand how theyre making money off it.)


author=JosephSeraph
seconding that GraphicsGale is fantastic

btw, aside for being great for learning, complex and fluid animations are often less impacting than they seem, and you can achieve almost the same satisfactory feel with a battle system by just using very expressive keyframes / poses, such as in Romancing SaGa 3
By animating the frames themselves (rather than making more frames) you can potentially make very elaborate and satisfying motions with a quite small spritesheet, while you can still make a stiff and unexciting battle system if you make a bunch of really fluidly well animated poses but don't implement these in a good way

I understand this concept, you have to if you're using RPG maker without a sprite script, since you have to do all animations in 3 frames, which for a double gun user is a pain in the ass >:\


author=StormCrow
Most likely, because you're still (relatively) bad at pixel art and animation frames are EXTREMELY unforgiving of misplaced pixels because they require, to a certain extent, total perfection; a sprite basically has two states it can be in, "properly animated" or "not". There is no in between, there is no "good enough".

But the good news is, you're getting better, which will make it less frustrating with time. Frustration is generally the price paid for grinding your skills, and this is very true of pixel art. So work through the frustration and you will get better and it will be less frustrating as a result.

Unless you're like at me, where you quit anything you're bad at almost immediately, or (in this case) when you've reached the BARE minimum skill level necessary to diddle around some pixels without wanting to chop someone's head in half with a hatchet. But I don't even attempt to make my own sprites from scratch (except for this one time), let alone animate them. I have just enough pixel fiddling ability to get by.

I'm building my sprites from the ground up. I don't like the babyish default sprites, mine look like this:


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