Animating

PsychoticStudios

I'm new to 2d games so I was wondering do you guys use a certain program OR do you how do you make picture by picture?

beefy_clyro

Each frame of the animation needs to be a separate png file. What you create your pictures in is up to you.

LumpApps

You can try http://www.pencil-animation.org/
Perhaps it works for you.

old_kipper

Pencil is a bit 'quirky', but I use it a lot, as well as DoInk on ipad, and for pixel art pixen is good.

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/doink-animation-drawing/id364762290?mt=8

http://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/13363/pixen

SpriteAttack

I mainly work with vectors - nice and easy when you got all the body parts together it's a lot like cut-out-animations... You take the bits and rotated them on the their pivot points [which act as joints] and Corel Draw allows me to do multiple pages to easy animate elements... Afterwards I export or copy and paste it into the bitmap tool and from there to separate png files...

Here's a sample of the rather simple character [consisting of just 30 basic vector shapes grouped into head, neck, body, legs and arms (both consisting of 3 separate parts)] for our current Utopian Games app:


The same technique works in inkscape and that's a free alternative to CorelDraw and Illustrator... It works the same way in Flash when you create your elements, adjust the pivot points and animate them within a movieclip...