Game Dev in Motion #2: Designing and animating top-down 2d sprites

Game Dev in Motion #2! ...in which we talk about designing top-down animations and give you a simple method for testing simple frame-by-frame animations direct from Photoshop to Flash in a couple of easy steps. Some what a direct follow-up to GDIM #1 - thanks for all the super feedback.

We cover:

• Deciding what to animate
• How to animate _and_ rotate a top-down sprite
• Drawing large and rendering small
  • the complexities of scaling sprites down -- or more specifically designging sprites such that they can be scaled down and why they look, well, silly at their original scale
  • ...and the suggestion of what the player sees and how that's perceived
• Testing animations
  • in code
  • with tools - specifically flash, by:
    • getting your layers (frames) in order in PhotoShop
    • scaling to size
    • importing into Flash
    • organising an animation around keyframes
    • manipulating frame rate in flash
    • adding a background layer to the animation (see GDIM #1 for more on the backgrounds)
  • we also point out some of problems -- specifically the artifacting issue we were seeing on the first imported frame
• We also explore using Flash to test movement along with aniamtion - and, well, we prove that it can be done.
• A little about animation and sprite sheet workflow - using Zwoptex for our spritesheets (which are being managed by Cocos2d in our game code).
• Working out framerates -- or, well, iterating the framerates through testing (why to test the things in the first place)

We also give away some information about the item unlocks and other game design bits in Dead West. Enjoy ;)