Characters (Part 3)

September 7, 2011
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I made my main character in Muay Thai 2 by drawing a picture and using F8 to convert it to a movie clip.
   

Figure 6.1

You don't have to paint it. Just keep drawing the outline. This way will keep your Flash file small and it won't take long time when you test your Flash game. I named my main character as "man" as you see in Figure 6.1.

Now we have to get inside this Movie clip by double clicking it.

You can see in Figure 6.2 below how I laid out the actions and labels of my main character.
 

Figure 6.2

In the layer "label", I put frame label names corresponding to my main character actions in layer "animation". For example, in frame label "stand", I have 4 graphics and each graphic takes 2 frames duration. Take a look at "walk" frame label. I also have 4 graphics and each of them takes up only one frame duration.

Figure 6.3

There will be more than 2 layers later on but right now I am going to focus on how to construct your character first.

I will talk about other layers(especially "coding and action script") in other topics which is not hard.

Now, I hope you get a picture how to create your character roughly. You could fill in colors for your character just to see how it will look like. For me? I filled colors in when I was sure that the game worked since along the way, you will have to always test your movie and it takes time to compile if you have a colorful flash file. So, just keep it in mind then that to paint it last ;)

Figure 6.4: The special move from Muay Thai 2

Some moves do not require many graphics as you think. Take a look at the animation above, Figure 6.4, the special move. It looks like you have to draw a lot of pictures but if you look more closely at graphic 3 to 6, they are just the same picture. You can reuse some pictures for other actions of your character as well ;)


(Note: I like this background color, a bit green and yellow. Since this color was hardly used for my character, it is a good way for checking which part your don't paint yet. If you use white as background, you might miss painting some white spot on your character.)