How to make your characters ride things

The journey you might send your heroes on can be very long. Do you expect them to walk all that way?
There are so many occasions where you might want to have riding sprites - cutscenes, army leaders on horse or maybe a pig-riding minigame.

So, imagine, we have this handsome young lad:


And he will ride on a pig:


...for reasons I guess.

To start off, we need to copy the pig on an empty sheet and adjust its grid.

With it’s current 48*48 grid and the human’s 48*48 grid, there is no way to put the man on top of it without cutting him off.
So, we gonna make some room on the pig.

With just some copy and paste (and making the grid 48*72 in my program) we now have all the room we need.

Let’s start with the sideview rider:

We simply take the whole walking cycle out of the sheet and combine the snippet, where the arm moves forward with the one where the leg moves forward.

Then we simply erase the leg and remains of the arm and have a static rider.
If we want the hair animated, we just take the usual walking cycle and replace the body with our edit and keep the head as it is.
Tip: We could also place this sprite on a bench or chair and use this as a sitting pose.


Without further edits, we can drop him on our pig and are safe to go!

For the front version:

We will need the full walking cycle again to get the desired pose.
Then we spread the legs of the static sprite by sloping them to the side. For some extra detail you can tilt the feet a little.

And again, we need the arms of the walking poses, of both we need the part where they are moved to the front, to match the side sprite and a riding position.

and again, we can use the hair animation of the walking frame to make our sprite movement a bit less static.


If we try to assemble this sprite, we will run into a problem. Either we have to place him too far on the back or he overlaps the head.


To fix this, we take the pig and remove everything that would definitely not over the sprite. In this case, everything behind the head outline.
This might differ though, for a horse or giraffe you might have to seperate the neck as well, for a wolf you have to decide which tufts of fur go in front of the rider… and so on.

Back to our pig, we now just place the pig parts over our previous sprite:


Perfect!

Now to the remaining part, the back:

The steps are the same as for the front sprite, as the pose is exactly the same.

Assembling does not require further edits though.


Charge into battle, brave pig rider!

I love that the title is open ended with “things” to suggest they may ride a non-animal into the battle. Why yes, this is my trusty battle refrigerator.

How can any game not have the hero riding to the rescue sat on a pig?

Though having said that, @Ms Littlefish 's hero on a battle fridge does open up quite a vista of imaginative possibilities, including a Fine Dining Joust, with the Big Bad on a blender, because the BB would naturally want to liquidise the opposition.

Lovely tutorial.

COMBAT TOASTER

You guys are super weird and I love you.

Never leave home without it

@Avery, thank you as always. But the image links seem to be broken

@Gunmetal_Dreams I'm wagering that's a forums/server error, as they appear to be attached files.

They are in a google doc, until now I never had that problem. But I updated it and it seems to work again.

This is amazing, I was just doing the same in GIMP, however, I am pretty new to RPG maker and cant get my sprites within a 48x48 and if I do the 48 x 72 dimensions and export, it will not read it. Help me, im stupid!

How do you turn them without making them become super pixelated, like the censorship was applied to them?