Let’s make sure your characters look good from all angles.

A picture can tell a thousand words, but an animation can show even more. A character’s personality is expressed in how they move – whether that’s preparing to take action, or actually getting themselves moving.

In 3D games, the game engine will exhibit a character’s model from all directions. In 2D games, artists will draw all possible views, or “sprites,” of a character carrying out all actions in the game. Murder, being tailor-made for pixel-art games, focuses on making this as easy as possible.

Idle versus walking

If a character naturally floats off the ground, perhaps it’s okay to use the same floating animation when the character moves. Most bipedal characters aren’t so lucky – these characters will need to be depicted with separate animations for rest and in motion.

Which directions?

For side-scrolling games, maybe you only need an animation for the character at rest and one for running to the right. For characters in games with an overhead camera, more animations may be required.

For overhead games, generally the term “north” is shorthand for moving the character up the screen. Similarly, moving “south” means to move the character down, “west” means to move left, and “east” means to move right.

Four directions is a good number for many games, though some use six, eight, or more!

Flip?

If you decide to animate in eight directions, both idle and running, that’s sixteen separate animations to build. That’s a lot of animations! But, characters often look the same when moving left as they do when moving right. Murder allows you to “flip” the sprites in this case, which might cut down on some of the animations required.

Next steps

In the next section we will discuss building animations in Aseprite, a popular animation program.