This is my first blog post.

I am making a videogame as a learning exercise, using SDL 2.0 as my framework (I can't call it an engine, but I'm using it as my game engine).

I opted to attempt a 2D Turn Based game.

Animation

I have followed SDL tutorials and am now familiar with [Textures] and [Rectangles] in SDL, necessary for animating characters in the game.  I wrote wrapper code to turn my sprite sheets into living characters.

Now that I have achieved animation implementation, I focused on getting a practical art asset pipeline (drawing the sprite sheets).

1)  I first tried Medibang.  I had to manually position the sprites in my sprite sheet, and the Surface Pro 4 (tablet) didn't work.

2)  I then tried using Graphics Gale.  I found out I'm a terrible pixel artist.

3)  I checked out Krita again.  It turns my tablet into an electric oven.  But I can draw without lag, it has animation support, exports a series of png files, and I can use texture Packer to create the sprite sheet.

Gif with 1 Boar was made with Medibang.

The 3 sprite men were made with Graphics Gale, and the three boars were made with [ Krita + Texture Packer ].

What did I learn?

Animation is expensive, took me way longer to draw 16 frames of animation than I would have liked.

I want to focus more on programming more features, and less on animating.  Although I do want to see how "pretty" I can push a game.

For now, I'll try to stick to easier character designs and shorter idle animations.