Below is a quick sketch, with some notes on the concept, not going to go into more details than that...


So, a few days ago, I decided to fire up Piskel (my go to animation editor these days) and start looking at some of the animations needed for Goldroids and the Mini In-Game. The first few efforts had absolutely nothing to do with Goldroids, but in lack of inspiration, I just had to do something...




The last animation is something I drew on the C64 almost 25 years ago. I thought I'd lost all files/executables until - by chance - I stumbled upon a floppy with some work I'd done previously. There was 40-50 files on the floppy itself, but one was called ANIMOK.PRG. I loaded it up, entered the monitor on Action Replay Mk. 6 and looked through the source... Found a nice start (78 A9 in hex) and tried the GO command, and there it was.. After all these years... I've always wanted to port this animation to the MAC, but never really wanted to re-do it. I wanted to keep it as original as possible. So, after 50-60 screenshots trying to capture all the frames in the animation, and ending up with 4, I started pixelling. I even faked 2x1 multicolour pixels , just to keep it as authentic as possible. And I can tell you the result is 100% the same as on the C64. This made my day, so I postponed any Goldroids animations until next day. As you do...

Last night I finally had my inspiration topped up and started on some Goldroids animations. The Mini In-Game will be a horizontally game, so I needed some side view animations of the player sprite. Even though I knew it would end up in a bunch of work, I decided I wanted to change the original animation of the player sprite as well. The rotating gradient is supposed to be the power source and the small spheres is suppose to be the propulsion. I wanted the propulsion to rotate (opposite the gradient direction) when the player was moving. Below are some idle and some moving animations of the different version of the player sprite. Thank God Piskel supports layers, as the rotating spheres was terrible to rotate. I don't envy the 8-bit artists doing all this in a sprite editor on C64. I had to make a foreground and a background layer of the same spheres, rotating in opposite directions and erasing whatever pixels not needed for the frames. I'm very happy with the end result, but, man, that was some effort...


Now, the original top view player sprite in the Goldroid game hasn't got rotating spheres when moving, so I though I'd "just" add it to the animation. Well, "just" my ass... No matter what (and how much) I tried, the animations/rotations just didn't add up. It took ages to manage to get a decent result. I even considered pulling out the paper/pencil/ruler and go oldskool for a minute, but couldn't actually find a ruler at the time :)

And no matter how I rotated the spheres, the "path" just looked awful. I did do it manually, by eye, but it just wasn't smooth or consistent at all. In the end, I started PhotoShop and went systematically through all the positions needed. Placed different coloured spheres to form a path, and finally it looked good :)

Used this as a template in Piskel, and was amazed how smooth the rotation was. Sometimes, I guess, you just have to do things systematically.

The last obstacle was to get the gradient and the sphere rotation to sync (use same amount of frames). I kind of had to cheat a bit here, as it just wouldn't add up. The gradient moves 3 pixels anti clockwise every frame, except frame 4,8 and 12 where I had to move it 4 pixels. The spheres covers most of the gradient anyway, so you can't really the cheat (although, I know it's there, and it'll probably haunt me until the day I die!!!! That's just the way my OCD works, I'm afraid).

Anyway, top view animations below...


I have to confess that I'm a bit fed up with pixels and animations after these last 2 nights, so I decided to write this part for the Diary of a Game instead.

Next on the agenda is making some interior graphics for the Mini In-Game and start setting it all up in Construct 2. Haven't decided whether to go for tiles or sprites for the graphics yet, I guess it'll have to be tried and tested - both...

I suppose I'll be back with more in Goldroids - Diary of a Game as soon as I've made some more progress. Whenever that will be.

Until next time...