Characters (Part 2)

September 5, 2011
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When you design a character in fighting game type, you need to know what action your character would perform. Make a list of moves you want him/her to do. For example, my Muay Thai 1, the main guy(red pants), I listed his moves below.

- Standing
- Walking
- Guarding
- Crouching
- Rolling foreward
- Rolling backward
- Punching step 1
- Punching step 2
- Punching step 3
- Punching step 4
- Kicking step 1
- Kicking step 2
- Kicking step 3
- Kicking step 4
- Special move 1
- Special move 2
- Getting hit 1
- Getting hit2
- Getting juggling
- Getting up
- Dying

Gee! That's a lot, huh? Well, you could do more or less than my list :) Anyway, after you got your list, just draw them out frame by frame. Here are some of my character movements.

Figure 5.1: Guarding

  

Figure 5.2: Crouching (crappy)

Figure 5.3: Punching step 1(still crappy >_<'')

Figure 5.4: Punching step 2

   
Let's take a look at Figure 5.4. When you make the frame by frame animation in Macromedia Flash, you might want to turn on the "Onion Skin" or "Onion Skin Outlines" as seen below.

Figure 5.5

When you click at the "Onion Skin", it will show the markers which you can adjust the width of it by dragging the bracket at the right or left side of the bracket.(see Figure 5.6)

Figure 5.6

   
You can see that it will show the faded image you drew around the onion markers. Then you can animate frame by frame better. For the "Onion Skin Outlines", it will be just the outline of the graphic(s) in the boundary of the onion markers as show below.

Figure 5.7

Try it! You can do it. Good luck ;)