Dragon sprite

[thespaceinvader]

The other thing that strikes me, looking back, is that the lower part of the back feet don't move at all - you should compress them at least a little bit.

[Gauteamus]

Great work on the dragon, both portrait and sprite.
Should the dragon have cross shaped pupils, like TSI's drakes do?

[thespaceinvader]

That would be a nice touch, if you felt like incorporating it =)

[melinath]

I like the cracks, but they're definitely not appropriate for all terrains - I think you could probably do with improving the 'splash' overall. That small point aside, though, that looks great. The portrait is coming on well, too.

Is it perhaps possible to make a version with cracks and one without, or perhaps make the cracks a halo? (And then filter the animations for terrain.)

[thespaceinvader]

You could, but it would be unnecessarily complicated - the cracks don't add enough to the animation to make the effort worthwhile - it would be better to direct effort into perfecting the splash, possibly adding some dust blowing out from the strike point as well as the motion blur/glowy...bit.

[tsr]

Ooh, and add a bit of trembling of the screen when it kills something (unless it is a gobo )...?

/tsr

[pixelmind]

As amazing as that animation looks, I think it doesn't reach far enough when it hits....

I actually intended to use the animation with offset.

Sure it would look more realistic otherwise, but:
- It would be dificult to make it look good and fluid
- It would likely take a lot more frames to do this properly
- I would have to make separate animations for all directions which would result in even more frames to do

Call me lazy, but this way saves a lot of time

Should the dragon have cross shaped pupils, like TSI's drakes do?

Good point.I totally forgot about it.


Yeah the cracks are barely visible ingame. I'll trash them and try to do some FX-magic

Update:

[thespaceinvader]

Looks nice =)

[melinath]

Better and better.

[Eternal]

I think a big, unified splash might look better. It would add power, which it currently lacks.

[pauxlo]

As amazing as that animation looks, I think it doesn't reach far enough when it hits....

I actually intended to use the animation with offset.

But then it (he/she?) "glides" with the back-feet - this would need a step, at least.

[thespaceinvader]

A little bit of offset sliding is acceptable. And given the size of this unit, it wouldn't need much. It's going to be damn near standing on the unit it's attacking anyway...

[lostnumber]

While this might just have to be what it is I do worry that the motion of the smash attack is a little too similar to when he rears up and breathes fire. But if you decide the ground smash is the right way to go then that might be unavoidable.

One problem I did notice, I'm playing Jacques UMC campaign and when the dragon is facing up and breathing fire at a unit directly above him, the actual fire effect misses hitting the targeted unit by a significant margin.

I'm not an artist so I dont know the proper fix to this, but it looked very odd to have the dragon breathing fire past the units side and the unit reacting like he got hit.

[Jacques_Fol]

One problem I did notice, I'm playing Jacques UMC campaign and when the dragon is facing up and breathing fire at a unit directly above him, the actual fire effect misses hitting the targeted unit by a significant margin.

I agree it's a little awkward, but that problem is sort of divorced from the actual unit sprite and represents a separate coding/art challenge for the animator. In this case, the freshman animator in question could only achieve as much. For details:

Spoiler:

The fire animation is a separate animation, consisting of several images of jets of fire that can be sihfted around and coded in parallel to the unit animation. Ideally, these images of fire would also be drawn especially for the unit, and then could be made to fit perfectly both the positioning of the dragon's mouth (where they're coming out) and the unit on the North hex (which they're supposed to hit).

As I could not draw them again myself, I was left with the challenge of trying to make the existing images used with the old Fire Dragon work as much as possible by shifting them on the x and y axes relative to the unit image, as I intimated in the initial announcement:

For the fire breath animations, I had to try and match the fire missile (aka jets of flame) to the positioning of the unit, a task further complicated when it came to the straight-north- and straight-south-facing animations (where one is in danger of the fire either not coming out of the mouth as it's supposed to or missing the unit that it's supposed to be hitting). I hope I did a decent enough job, but would be entirely happy if one of the coding wizards showed me how to improve it.

I tried moving the images even a little more to the left, so that the unit would be clearly "hit", but then it would look like the fire was coming out the dragons ears rather than his mouth. To my eye, that was the best "compromise" spot with the existing fire frames.

And just to complete the picture: I was actually faced with the same challenge for the NE and SE sideways attacks - the initial placement of the fire missiles when taken from the old Fire Dragon were also (obviously) way off. However, in those instances, I was happy to find that it was possible to shift the existing frames so as to make a credible impression of fire both leaving the dragon's mouth and hitting the unit it should. I guess your comment implicitly confirms as much.

But, all that said: If someone were to draw the fire missiles to go slightly to the left for the straight-up animation, it wouldn't be hard to replace the existing animation with the new one that would have the flames go directly towards the unit.

[pixelmind]

@Eternal: not sure if a unified splash looks better. I kind of like the detailed version.
btw, how's the fire dragon coming along ?

about the fire breath animation:
There will be a north and south facing animation ( or at least I will turn the head in the right direction ).


Added some further motion to the feet.


Also tried to make north and south facing baseframes


and a turntable