Sprite Sheet help!

CalvinGames

Hey everyone, I am wanting to make a side scrolling platformer game, but dont know how to make a sprite sheet or even where to begin. Do i need a side view of my character, do i need to make a walk cycle for it to make it walk in the game. How to make him look like hes jumping? Just everything for characters.

Please Help!!

KevinCross

I would probably start making the game before worrying about the character graphics and animations. If art and animation isn't your thing and you're not wanting to pay an artist to do it for you, try simplifying your character and going for one where you can get away with unrealistic walking/running animations i.e. a monster or alien or a character with no legs which I think Chucky Egg was

KevinCross

It was Dizzy, not Chuckie Egg. And Dizzy (which was an egg) only had feet. No legs.

jamie_c

Also Gamesalad uses frames of animation, not actual sprite sheets like some other engines. You'll need to create and save each frame as a separate file and import those into Gamesalad once you have them created.

CalvinGames

Can I make them in Illustrator?

bjandthekatz

You can make it however you want. Just export the frames individually, instead of a sprite sheet.

tenrdrmer

yep you need individual .png files. No sprites sheets yet for GameSalad

Gamepenciler

Yup no sprite sheet in game-salad. Also you need to do them in powers of 2 per frame so that it won't cause crashing I think.

VolontaArts

@ecanhoj can you explain powers of 2 per frame?

oh and make sure you make it double the size of what you want it to be in iPhone.
and make sure its divisible by 4

so lets say i make a character that i want to be 200x200pixels in the iPhone...... the pixel size of my artboard in illustrator would be 400x400.

CalvinGames

Okay thanks guys!

tenrdrmer

@burberryarts

the powers of 2 is a RAM management Rule. Image ram is figured by basically a container size. and each container are determined by the powers of 2 So the containers would be 2,4,8,16,32,64,128,256,512,1024,2048

as you can see theres not much of a difference in the lower numbers but when you get up into 256 and higher it becomes a big deal. an actor the is 258x258 is going to use all the ram of a 512x512 image so what you need to watch for is those cases where you can bump down the image a few pixels and all of a sudden you have drastically reduced your ram usage. Keep I'm mind that is Actual image size. not actor size

Hopefully that helps explain it. if not check out this Comment http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/comment/216554/#Comment_216554

Its a good example of what the powers of 2 are talking about

VolontaArts

@tenrdrmer you been a lot of help! thanks. i completely understand.