Mot's Animation System

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Published 2023-06-12


Mot's Animation System is a visual editor for creating 2D animations.

You start by sequencing sprites and/or tilemaps together to create the basic components. Then combine them using timelines and key-frames to make animations. Or combine them again to make bigger, more complex animations.

Animations can trigger sounds and music, and call back into to your main program, e.g. to trigger game play events.

You could use it for:

Animations can be loaded and played in your own carts (the loading and playback code is 1836 tokens). They can either be stored in Lua strings or loaded from a separate cart.

This is all very much in Beta at the moment!. And some corners had to be cut to fit everything into the token limit. In particular the editor doesn't prevent you from shooting yourself in the foot by:

It lacks any sort of undo/redo logic, so if you use this, please take frequent backups of your saved animations.

And also, because the animation code is 1836 tokens and the animation data can be several kilobytes, it's not the best fit for every program.

Feel free to @ me if you need any help.

Move the mouse over the window to display the UI.

You can pan the animation with the middle mouse button, and zoom in/out with the scroll wheel.
At the bottom right there are 3 controls:

The name of the current animation is displayed at the top. Click on it to select another animation.

Use the mouse wheel to scroll through the animations. Animations with a person icon are sprite/tilemap animations. Animations with a dotted line icon are key frame based animations.

At the top right are the menu icons. Clicking on them opens a drop down menu.

The hamburger menu is for creating/deleting animations.

You can create new animations of different types, or delete the current animation.

The hourglass menu is for saving and loading animation sets.

You can save/load your animations to from external carts or import sprites and tilemaps from another cart.

This is covered in more detail later.

Click "Properties" at the bottom of the screen to expand the properties panel.
This is where you edit the current animation. The UI changes based on the animation type.

When expanded, the "Properties" bar also displays two icons. These toggle between different tabs.
The I icon displays information and settings for the animation. Once again they differ based on the animation type. The other icon will be the person or dotted line depending on the animation type, and switches back to the main editor.