How to handle lots and lots of art for battler animations/poses

Suppose you're making a fairly complex 2D game.


Let's make it simple: you have one actor.


She has 10 different outfits, all of which can be mixed and match to form basically millions of combinations.


She can also use 10 different weapons, each with their own look.


She can use 6 different skills.


Each skill has an animation, maybe about 6-10 frames depending on the complexity


In order to make it realistic, each animation should show what she's currently wearing, as well as what she's holding (if the animation displays the weapon).


How can this be done?

Using animated battlers or not?


If you're not using animated battlers, maybe you can make different animations then make a tag which defines which animation a skill uses per weapon. It would be troublesome if you have lots of weapons and skills though.


The only method that I know of for making dynamic animation would be making the animation per frame using scripts during the animation time itself.. Like show images for anim1, wait x frames, so images for anim2 and so on until the last frame for the animation.


IDK of any easier way.

Depends on the sample resources.

If each combination has different image, then conditional branches (I said, branches) should do this job

If the image resources are separated like generator parts, then multiple sprites for a single battler should do

Assumed you have animated battler

I'm also working on this one btw

Yes, your actor is shown in battle (if that's what you mean by "animated battlers").


We have scripts that allow you to compose an actor's sprite based on separate images based on what you're currently wearing.


It seems like the same idea could be done with animations as theo suggests, so that the final animation is generated dynamically based on the given input.


This is similar to static animations, where you literally hand-draw each full frame beforehand, except now you just take out the actor because the actor will be generated dynamically.

Yep, that's exactly how I'd do it. Character-generator-type script that will build the sprite by blitting all the components together each time the components list changes.


When you say "animations" do you mean "poses", or do you mean actual battle animations (the ones in the Animations tab)? They would be a bit more difficult to create on the fly, though I'm sure it could be done.

Battler poses.

then it would probably be easier, Yami's symphony for example could take a weapon icon and use it as a weapon animation for the battler.


Now if your sprite already has been modified to reflect the equipments, then you just need to make sure that the battle system takes all of that modification.

In rm2k3 they had weapon sheets as separate and move in synch with battlers (making it finnicky in terms of positioning the weapons)