Animations!  Guitars!  Pixels!  This devlog has it all!

It's been a while!  But this grunge-rock GB Studio indie project still lives (and people are still downloading the original pixel art??  Please tell me why?!)

Recently I've been hard at work on the game's player animations - and figuring out how to use a new piece of software...  Aseprite!  In the past, all of my art was hacked together in a program called Clip Studio Paint.  Which is a powerful workhorse of a digital art studio.  It's great for pretty much anything digital art - but when it comes specifically to making pixel art animations...  It just feels a little overcomplicated.

So I've moved the animation part of my sprite sheet workflow to Aseprite, and it's been a real breath of fresh air.  To be honest, I've used CSP for so long now that I'll still start there with any design work, but the animation workflow provided in Aseprite is so much more accessible.  You can tell it's primed for working with pixel art.  It even has a built-in 'export for Twitter' button - we were meant to be together!

From the outset, there are a few key animations we'll need for our player to jam like it's 1999:

1. Strumming (very important)
2. Idle bobbing (he's the cool guy standing at the back of the show)
3. Walking
4. The Jump (stage-dives?)
5. Just a note to say attack animations are another piece of the puzzle, but we'll circle back to those in a later devlog.

Let's get into it with...

Strumming

This was difficult because how the heck do you fit a whole guitar in a 16x24 pixel grid?!  ...after a lot of trial and error, it's something like this:

Design-wise, I've based this guitar on the classic Gibson Flying-V.  The pointed ends and iconic shape allowed for a more impactful outline than something with more of the traditional Stratocaster body, particularly when it's being held by the player.  And honestly, a Strat just didn't feel grunge enough for our protagonist anyway!  But that's not to say something more Strat-y (maybe even a Les Paul??) won't make an appearance down the road.  Ideally in the finished game, there will be a number of guitars the player can purchase and upgrade between.  So let me know if you have any ideas!  Regardless, I feel like every punk rock kid in the '90s would have killed for a Flying V.

Once the guitar was done, it's just wrapping it in a couple of frames worth of head bob and strum 🤘 (most of this was the hair flip).

Idle Bobbing + Walking

These are really just a couple of the essentials for a pixel-game that wants to have any sense of polish.  The interesting thing I learnt here - which applied to all of the player sprites - is that for the GameBoy, there's a very clever way to optimize sprite sheets.  Because a lot of the frames use exactly the same e.g. head tiles, it becomes more efficient for the hardware if you split sprites into pieces and have the frames assembled in-engine.  It makes more sense when you compare the two versions of a sprite sheet, here's an example below for the idle bobbing:

The original sprite sheet (left) would consume a total of 18 sprite tiles in GB Studio, while the optimized sheet (right) consumes only 16 sprite tiles.  Now that doesn't sound like a lot - and why is this even important?  Well, by default the GameBoy only allows for a total of 96 sprite tiles per scene.  Which also isn't a lot!  You can wiggle that number up if you're smart enough (each scene's sprites, text, and background tiles compile on the same sprite sheet towards a shared total of 384 tiles).

That's a lot of numbers to think about - but the TLDR point is - the GameBoy hardware has a cap on the number of sprite tiles you can have in a scene.  If you can save on a couple of tiles here or there, it makes a big difference in the long run - particularly in this case when the player sprite will appear in almost every scene!  Optimizing the walking sprite sheet also saved on 2 tiles - so just from this pair of 3-frame sequences we're already up 4 tiles!

Here are the player's completed idle and walking sprites:

Jumping

Just like-a Mario!  When I first sat down to approach this, I had two frames in mind.  One to use on the way up, and one to use on the way down.  These were the two original designs:

That all seems sensible enough, and if I was working on Game Maker or a platform I was familiar with, this probably would have worked out as planned...  BUT I have no clue how to make GB Studio recognise the direction of a player's momentum.  I'm sure there's a way to do it, but it seems horrendously fiddly for what would in actual fact be a relatively small payoff - and that's in an engine that's not exactly primed for fiddly.  After all the effort it might not even look as good as I'd imagined!

Realising the headache this could be to code, and after doing a bit of jump playtesting, I decided against working with two frames.  Admittedly, the first frame would have been the obvious choice for a GameBoy platformer (very Mario-esque, no?) but something about the second 'falling' frame I'd designed looks way too much like David Lee Roth's iconic jump split.  So for this punk rock retro adventure, of course I've gone with that!

That's all for this week on the greatest grunge-rock GB platformer of all time.  Stay tuned! (or get tuning?)

conoro