Amazing asset! Love the vibrant colours! It's rare for such a colourful asset to have such a good palette.
I'd like to make a suggestion about the animations though. Not about the animations themselves but about the structure.
Generally you've done a great job having a consistent folder structure. That helps a lot for users to have an animation engine that works on runtime without writing a special case for every animation. There are however some inconsistencies that make it a bit harder and require "if statements" to get addressed that would otherwise be unnecessary. I'll mark them here in the order that I encountered them in case you want to change them. Note that I operate under the assumption that each folder inside an animation represents a layer that contains mutually exclusive animation parts and I only checked the character animations, not the rest.
* Within the Acc layer, there are subfolders that represent layers (beard, elf, butterfly) but there are also pngs there that could be in their own subfolder (headgear). There's also a pirate eyepatch there that I think would be better in its own folder (eye accessories or eyegear whatever)
* The fishing animations have a weapons folder but unlike the rest of the animations with a weapons folder instead of having a weapon type subfolder it's just pngs of the fishing rod tiers. That means that there needs to be a check when encountering a weapons folder to determine if there are subfolders inside or just pngs.
* Similarly, the 4th animation (pickaxe hoe and bugnet) has subfolders for the first two, but the bug net is just a png
* The horse, bicycle, bear and broomstick folders all represent a mount layer but since it doesn't have a consistent name all require a special case. Also the horse and bear require an offset for the character animations to display correctly while the rest don't
* Umbrella, flute and healer stuff should all go to the weapons layer but their naming is inconsistent so they need a special check. Also the umbrella is quite non standard. It has the only transitional animation I've seen here (the opening animation) which only exists for the idle animation.
* The special Fx layer that exists for some animation is not standardised: sometimes it's just Fx.png, others its "Fx [action].png" (like "Fx sweating .png" (it also has that insidious empty space at the end there)) others it's "[action] FX.png" like "Blood FX.png" in Damage animation and "Arrow Fx.png" (note that Fx here is not all capitalized like Blood FX) in Bow and arrow animation. Also, in the bow animation the fx is within Bow and arrow folder, which makes sense conceptually, since it belongs to the arrow, not the player, but if we're thinking character animation layers, it should be top level like the rest of the effects.
* The swim outwater animation has Accessories folder instead of the standard Acc
* "Hair's" folder is named "Hair" on horse animation. Yes it's better grammar but it's non standard :P
* The swim submerged animation does not have a left direction. I understand it's pointless, but all the rest have it.
So that's all I kept notes on. I might be missing some. They may look like they're many but for such a massive undertaking they're about as many as expected.
My suggestion however is not to simply fix the inconsistencies. I think the project might start becoming unwieldy for you and the users. I suggest you add animation metadata (json would work well because it's very flexible) for every animation so a generic engine can run all the present and future animations you may add! That's kinda how 3d animations work. For example the sims games are so easy to add new animations to because it's not the sim that holds the animation data, but the new objects, so adding new objects easily adds new actions without needing to change anything about the core engine. Unfortunately 2d animations have no standard equivalent afaik plus this stuff is more difficult to do in 2d because for every new animation you need to make more assets instead of just data to move a skeleton but it still would be so much more flexible! For example you could easily add transitional animations like a landing animation that after jumping/falling transitions to the idle animation. I'm not actually suggesting you add transitional animations because they would be a lot of work for a project that size I'm just using it as an example of how flexible using animation metadata can be.
Actually I've created a small project to showcase all character animations here: https://watersilver.itch.io/farmrpganimationviewer
It's not public, the password is 'farmrpganims' (if you want me to take it down let me know)
In this project I've used a simple version of what I'm proposing: I've made a godot resource for every animation that defines how the textures should be split, how many animation frames there are per direction, at what frame each directional animation starts and the character offset (for horses and bears). A simple custom animation node takes that data and runs the animation.
Animation metadata could be much more flexible than that and it could also save space. You basically already have some metadata, but it's baked in the empty space you're using in the pngs. For example most hats are the same sprite but for each frame they are positioned differently. That's basically offset metadata. The size could blow up if you decide to add more animations, or even more clothes etc. However the metadata could have instructions on hat offset per frame for example and save all that space.
However even if you don't try to save space a simple version of metadata would mean that a simple animation engine could only need the folder name the animation is in and then detect the metadata and run the animation without the user needing to do anything more than that manually. Adding a new animation from the side of the user could be as simple as just dropping in the new folder, and passing its name to the engine!
If you like the idea but have trouble structuring the json, I'd be happy to help! Regardless of whether you do any of that I hope to see more of your stuff! Again, great work!
Viewing post in Tiny Farm RPG - Asset Pack [16x16] comments
Hey, you're overcomplicating things. You can create a character builder with all the animations for your game in just a couple of hours and apply them directly to a hero or NPC, allowing you to swap their skins in real-time while playing. What you're proposing just creates extra work for the artist and would take a huge amount of time.