Tiny Animator is done!!! (Patreon)

As explained in previous post, 8$+ patrons can download it right now! 

3$ patrons can also get the downloads now! 

For everyone else, Tiny Animator will be publicly released on the Pico-8 BBS in just a few days (probably Wednesday)!!

But let's go over some of the features and things to know:

Tiny Animator is an animation editor for making 8x8 animations, which are ideal in Pico-8.

With this tool you can create your animations, using the base humanoid model or your own (instructions further below), put an imported skin on it and export the generated sprites, either to a png or to your clipboard as formatted sprites that you can directly paste into your Pico-8 sprite-sheet.

The best way to understand the editor should be to use it but here are a few things you may want to know to use saves, skins and custom models:

You can also save and load your animations using the clipboard. After hitting the save button, you can ctrl+V in a text file and that's your save. To load it: select it, ctrl+C, go into Pico-8, ctrl+V and hit the load button!

(to use the following features, it is recommended to have two instances of Pico-8 opened at the same time)

You can import skins to apply to your animation. To do this, simply make a skin based on the shape your using (the humanoid one by default) in Pico-8. Then ctrl+C your 8x8 tile containing the skin, get back in Tiny Animator, ctrl+V and hit one of the free skin buttons.

You can also use a custom base! Be warned, doing so will reset the rest of the editor. Like for the skins, you want to draw your base in the sprite-sheet and then copy it to the animator and hit the base button. If you want to have your base all linked up like the default one, you simply gotta make sure each pair of pixels which should be connected have consecutive colors (e.g.: 4 and 5). Prefer to go from the color 1 and up with each link. The pixel of lowest color will serve as anchor point to move all connected points as one.

'fpf' is Frames Per animation Frames. It's the number of Pico-8 frames (running at 30 fps) between each animation frame. 3 or 4 are generally good values but you may want a 6 or higher for rougher animations. (you can also play your animations backward with negative numbers)

That is all of the things you may not have been able to guess. The rest of the features are pretty straight-forward, so I suggest you simply give it a go and touch everything and tell me if you encounter any weird behaviour!