Body to body: Animation with sprites
As the structured portion of my software engineering course comes to an end, I find myself with a little extra time to further explore the aspects of the craft that interest me. That aspect is the visual one. While I do fancy the routine of filling out a good model in the backend, there’s just something about the instant gratification of changing margin left and right to auto in the css that cant be replicated. While down this rabbit hole I explored to concept of animation and all of the resources I came accross based around something called sprites.
What are sprites?
According to techterms.com “A sprite is a bitmap graphic that is designed to be part of a larger scene. It can either be a static image or an animated graphic. Examples of sprites include objects in 2D video games, icons that are part of an application user interface, and small images published on websites.” Think of the animations made in the corner of a notebook. Now put all those pictures on one sheet and write a function or series of functions that regulate which aspect of the sheet to render ever second and thats pretty much how it works as I understand it. While I haven’t had the opportunity to attempt the practice just yet, the concept seems like something I am definitely going to lose hours and megabytes playing around with.
Game Engines
Most game engines advertise taking some of the coding out of the process to enable the creator to focus on content but I have not yet seen first hand what these puppies can do. Probably not smart that I already downloaded one considering I have no idea what it does in practice or how to use it but by the time you read this (“you” being a future employer who’s about to make their best hiring move since Allen, and everyone loves Allen) this portion of the blog will likely be filled with comprehensive explanations on how this technology enabled me to make the best game ever.
Melon.js
The game engine I chose to try out is called Melon.js. They offer a variety of resources as well as tutorials and examples of creations by other users. The reason I chose this game engine is because at first glance it seem to have the ability to do everything I’m looking to do. Because I’m interested in attemting to create a web based game I assume I have to keep memory in mind in order for the game to run a smoothly as possible so a simpler animation style seems like the likely choice. Also because the show I’m basing my game off of also uses a simple animation this engine should make the process of game creation a lot easier.
