Creating the 2D Graphics: The unstoppable blackhole of time

Well, I've been learning some about animating 2D characters. I understand now why people hire artists to do the work for them. One, it's very time consuming and two, you begin to realize you're not very good and to take the time to become good takes away the time from development so number two is basically the same as number one, it's time consuming.

I'm hoping to get some screenshots up soon of some of my in game graphics. I'm also hoping that I'm doing the animations right. So far, how I'm accomplishing animation is just loading up a different texture (or a new section of a texture) that has the same graphic with some slight changes.

This becomes kind of like flipping through once of those stick pencil flipbooks. So when you start walking a character you start cycling through the textures to simulate his movement while walking.

When the player stops walking, you revert back to your standing still texture.

Anyway, hoping to get some screenshots up soon as well as get some more code posted.

It's just unbelievable the number of images needed for each type of movement. Even for creating dropped items like coins. If you want them to have some type of glimmer or such, yep, need a couple of images for each item. Like I said, time consuming.