![]() Things that go boomĬurrently our lasers are a puny red rectangle, but we can do better than that. Now our little space fighter will soar majestically through space. ![]() Now we add a conditional to our _update() function that will swap our sprites table depending on if the up or down direction keys are pressed. Then copy these sprites and animate the tail flicker for each. You can copy and paste your original to act as a starting point. Draw a sprite of the ship banking left and one banking right. Let’s animate it banking left or right when it moves. That’s made our ship look a little better, but it still looks static. Player.sprite = player.sprites below this to make a fast flicker. We’ll also increment this timer in the draw function and add the line In _init() where we declare our player table, you’ll need to add another animation timer and table of sprites, just as we did for the enemy. Even just a couple of pixels different between frames is enough to make a sprite come alive. Draw another sprite which shows the rocket engines flaring or flickering next to the original player sprite. We can repeat this process for the player’s ship, too. Run your game and check it out in action. The inclusion of the speed variable adds a little bit of flavour that makes faster-moving enemies animate faster. This looks complicated but really just compares the animation timer to the number of sprites in our sprites table and moves us along one. Below this, add:Įnemy.sprite = enemy.sprites In the main _draw() function, find the enemy loop and at the start of it add enemy.animtimer+=1 to increment each frame. Now, we need to actually tell it to change the enemy sprites along with the timer. To keep track of this we will need a timer: add enemy.animtimer=0 to the function as well. We will be moving through this table from left to right at set intervals. First of all, in the create_enemy() function we need to add a new table to our enemies that stores all the sprite indexes for their gruesome animation. To implement the animation, we will need to add a few things to our code. Don’t worry too much about smoothness as we can always edit them later. Next to your original enemy sprite, draw a few more to show it at various stages of jiggling menacingly. The sprite sheet, shown at the bottom of the screen (see Figure 1), indexes each sprite on the sheet with a number. Then, in runtime, we swap through these different sprites to make an object appear to come alive. So how do we animate? The easiest way is to draw a new sprite for each animation frame and store them in a sprite sheet. You can take this approach with all of your sprites. To demonstrate, we’ve highlighted the grey (colour 6) of our space fighter, with white (7) on the tips. But a classic approach is to choose a primary colour and use a lighter complementary colour to show highlighting, and a darker shade for shadow. See the palette image (Figure 2) for a breakdown of how they can be combined. Creator Joseph ‘Zep’ White spent a long time choosing a set of 16 complementary colours that offer a wide range of shades and tones. Part of PICO-8’s popularity is its striking 8-bit palette. And to the right you have your colour selector, brush size, and zoom sliders, as well as sprite flags. The tool set below allows you to draw, copy, select, pan, and fill. The big box on the top-left is your sprite window where you can plot pixels. Load up your game, then switch to the editor to look more closely at what we’ll be working with (Figure 1). If you’ve been following our PICO-8 tutorials from the start, you’ll already be acquainted with PICO-8’s small, but mighty, sprite editor. PICO-8 for Raspberry Pi starter guide PICO-8 Sprites and animation: Tools of the trade We’ll be taking a look at how to animate effective 8-bit sprites for our space shooter, how to use a sprite sheet for animation, some basic background ‘parallax’ scrolling, and some simple space explosions for good measure.īuild a Retro game with PICO-8 for Raspberry Pi Sprites – 2D images composed with pixels – have been a mainstay of game development since, well, forever, and have seen a recent resurgence due to the rise of pixel‑art indie titles like Celeste, Spelunky, and Stardew Valley. ![]() With a refreshingly simple set of tools, PICO-8 is the perfect place to plot pixels.
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