Easy, Free Program for Making Sprite Animations

Jurg

So, a friend and I want to make a game in the vein of 16bit era RPGs. He's agreed to do the programming (we both took CompSci classes together, and it's not really my cup of tea), and I've agreed to do the art. I've done some sketches and stuff, but I want to go into something a little more concrete and start making animations for the characters. (I'm pretty much starting from scratch here, but I'm okay with fucking around a bit and learning the program.)

What's a good program for making these animations? And are there any good tutorials available? Again, I'm starting from zero here, but I'd like to just buckle down and take a stab at actually making a game for once, instead of just making and abandoning Design Docs because nothing concrete was done.

Spoit

I don't do very much sprite work, but I usually use paint.net to make the layers, then import it into gimp to save it as a gif for the animations. But for something that goes into a game, the process is likely completely different. Still, paint.net is great for sprite work

Squidget0

If you have lots of animations to do, Spriter can be a good option, doubly so if an importer exists for whatever engine you're using. Basically, the way it works is that you make the "parts" of a sprite in an image-editing program (the arms, the legs, the head, ect) and then use Spriter to animate them on a timeline, swapping parts in and out as needed. The tutorial videos on their site explain it a lot better than I could, so check those out and see if it might suit your needs. It's good for platformer and fighting game sprites that want really precise good-looking movements.

Whether you use a program like spriter for the animating or not, you'll need an image-editing program to actually build the sprites themselves. There are lots of image-editing programs available, paint.net, gimp, and Photoshop are just some of the options. If you're going for a 16-bit SNES-y look you might want to find some tutorials on pixel-art. This tutorial is a solid start on pixel art, but there are plenty out there.

Good luck!

oleksandr

I would suggest to use 2 different programs:

first program to draw textures. I use "Corel Draw" to draw vector but you can use "Gimp" at http://www.gimp.org/ for raster textures (Gimp is free).

second program you will need to create animation out of your textures and to render a sprite sheet. I use Anatomy Sprite Animator tool.
You can also find video tutorials how to animate textures with Anatomy Sprite Animator at http://spritetools.com.

good luck!