shooting and walking

Hi!

I'm coding a game in the fashion of CONTRA (I have just begun)

I've been studyng the movements and animations of the Contra characters and I have foreseen that, given that they can shoot while walking, I'll have this problem sooner or later:

when they walk the walk animation triggers, which is usually complex requiring aproximately 8 frames (or so will be in my character).

So, if you shoot while walking the "shooting while walking" anim will trigger, making it pretty hard to coincide the movement of the legs between animations.

In CONTRA it fits perfectly, making me think that both parts of the character work independently while being parented.

So, is it too strange to have the character being only a pair of legs when walking, and setting another sprite that will be the top half of the char for the walking anim?

I actually am asking this before trying cause I'll have to create a load of frames and wnat to know if this is the correct way before working in vain.

You could just start the shoot while walking animation at the same animationframe as the walk a animation to make it fluid or like you suggested use two sprites for upper and lower body, depends on the complexity of the animations, really.

generally when it comes to games like this using multiple sprites is the route to go, legs seperate from the torso ect.

Using this method you can easily have the upper body shoot in multiple directions while keeping the leg animations fluid and looking good, also if your game has any weapon change outs or sprite tweaks based on power ups changing the upper body (normally fewer frames than the walk animations) it is a much simpler task.

just use pin behavior and image points to make sure the parts line up correctly.

I agree with BACLog, but the example-game (CONTRA) doesn't use seperate sprites as far as I can see, so I added my animation-frame example.

Contra does split the top and bottom half into 2 sprites.

so did megaman, most games that play in this style i can think of used this method.

generally if in the old school game the legs would move and the bottom half would animate differently and you could attack or shoot while walking it used this method. unless the sprite stopped moving before the action went off in which it most likely did not use this method.

but yeah Contra splits sprites into a top and bottom half.

OK, I'll go that way, then, and see what happens.

Thanks for the advice!