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I got a new toy! This lightbox should let me play around with some traditional animation on paper.
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With this new super-power, I will once again chase my dream of achieving Shantae-quality sprite animations.
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A sprite animation? … from paper sketches?? It’s more likely than you think. (YouTube) And in this case WayForward already did the hard work of figuring out how to simplify the details, so I just need to reverse-engineer their sprite into a sketch of equivalent simplicity and proportions.
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But I don’t want to just remake the game’s dances. I wanna make something new and super sexy. This “2 Phut Hon” dance might be fun, but aside from some epic boobage, the pose itself just kinda bounces in place. I think Shantae should have some flow in her movements…
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… so let’s add some Yoga to it.
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I’ll make the arch of her back follow along this curve so that she snakes upward.
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Now that I have my keyframes, let’s scale these down to double the size of the gameboy sprite, and digitally add some in-between frames. Maybe my Linux software store has something I can use?
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This old version of Pencil2D is slightly janky, but I think I can make this work.
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Ooh! This is animation is gonna come out nice!**
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Alright, let’s shrink it in half and trace over it in Aseprite.
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So here’s my new Shantae dance.
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… compared to the dances in the original game.
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My “reverse engineering” technique was kind of improvised on the spot. But it worked surprisingly well! It’s cool that it successfully preserved the original proportions and level of detail.
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In hindsight, using actual tracing paper probably would have made the animation easier, but I wanted to do this as cheaply as possible. It was just an experiment.