hmm, pixel art animation and me, not so good. So what was the alternative. I searched the great big internet, and found an article telling me that Inkscape was the tool to use. I had tried it before and liked the idea of being able to tweak the image without having to repaint it, just move the vector elements. So I found an image on Google that I could use as a reference image, and started painting.

Ok, maybe, just maybe I should have read some more about how, Inkscape was used to animate.. Ok so you make all the frames in Inkscape, export them one by one and then use Gimp (wonderful tool) to make the spritesheet.. Eeerrr, that was kind of what I didn’t want to do. So back to searching the net.

Success, Synfig! Ok, here was a tool that was vector based and could animate like hell Yay! So tried to import my Inkscape crab, as it was in svg format, but no success Not a great start, but ok, I could start over. So a new crab was born.. But hell to do, compared to Inkscape. Everything was drawn with the origin at the center of the screen, not the object, and worse, you can’t move the origin! What the ….? Ok, painting the first eye and made a group, everything is to be in groups in Synfig, and wanted to copy and mirror the group. Copy, ok. Mirror…. mirror… hmmm.. No? You can only mirror individual objects, and as the origin was fubar the first place I had to do this via scaling (x=-1.0) and the try to move the new mirrored legs to the right location, and by using the scale function something was off, and the moment was weird. I’t might have been me, but I didn’t have ANY problems in Inkscape. So the thought of having to do animation and rotating (around the center of the selected points only) and moving objects around, just told me to, not go there.

And the crab looked worse in Synfig, as every change was a pain compared to Inkscape.

So what to do… I was thing of using Unity and the new 2d animation support, but I used it before, with success but it felt off, and not completely thought through. So I hit the new for the third and final time. If I didn’t find anything I would just make 3-5 crappy crab frames in Gimp or PyxelEdit (another GREAT tool). But by luck I found what I was looking for, I hope. It’s called Spriter, and if it’s half as good as it looks I’m going to be a very happy guy. You can download the free version at the BrashMonkey site, and try it out for your self. I have played with the free version and the demo project last night, and it just feels right in every way. So I just spend the 25$ for the full version, and is now going to take the parts from the Inkscape crab, I know I have to export all the pieces into separate files (that might be something they will change in time, I have to investigate), and than use the skeleton system will be so easy to use, to do the animation. It might even have some inverse kinematics

I really believe the Spriter is going to be the solution to a lot of my animation challenges. I will return with my experience with Spriter soon

Now, go make games

– Henning

Well, having made a small test level in Pyxel Edit, I had to see if I could write a small importer for unity to make use of this new wonderful tool. I had newer written an editor script for unity before, and did have a lot of problems with references to the sprites I generated in the script… They did not exsist after the script exitede! :/ After a day of googling, asking in the unity forum, installing IRC and asking in the channel #unity3d without anyone being able to help, I did figure it out myself.

I had to import the sprites in unity as I normaly would, so they exsisted and would be referencable from the script, this I could do by loading them via Resources.LoadAll<Sprite>(name). The other problem was that all the tiles was clones of the original created game object and not the created prefab? Well that turned out to be simple to solve. All I had to do, was to use PrefabUtility.InstantiatePrefab instead of the normal Instantiate function, and everything worked
It was wonderful to finally see a level show up in unity that was created in an external editor.

I have continued to modify the editor script to make it more useful i.e. not to overwrite existing prefabs, as I want to be able to add colliders and scripts to the different prefabs without them being overwritten every time I update the tileset.

Use and modify the Pyxel Importer script as you want (Link to script), if you make any improvements to it, please let me know, so I can add the updated version to this post.

Two minor details about Pyexl Editor though

1. I can’t figure out how to detach a tile AND delete the drawing in one operation, for now I have to detach a tile by Ctrl+right clicking and then use the the eraser or the selection tool, mark it and delete.
2. It’s not possible to have multiple canvases per doc, so you would be able to create multiple levels using the same tileset without manually having to synchronize the tilesets between the different canvases. The developer know this, and are open to add this feature in the future.

Conclusion, I love Pyxel Edit! So much that I bought another copy today ($20) It has made it possible for me to start making tile based games, as I want them.

So now, go and buy Pyxel Edit and make games.

– Henning