Dragonbones Animations - Monsters

Since the first demo, I've been attempting to use the monster sprites from various Tales games (mainly the PS2 line), and may even dabble outside it depending on how well they can fit with the art style of the main creatures. With this post however, I would like to announce that I now have better access to those very same resources than I ever had before, which will make development a lot easier for me.

How It Started

As a refresher, the first place I went to for sprite resources regarding enemy sprites, was Spriters Resource; which is of course part of the VG Resource, whose content is user-generated. As far as the PS2 games go, Tales of Destiny DC only had a few sheets made, and that is because the sprites in-game are typically made up of various pieces. Only a few enemies were one single sprite, and probably were easier to extract compared to everything else made up of limbs and body parts. Something that I would find out the hard way once I started using programs like NinjaRipper, which can rip textures from emulators and dump them in a folder.

From there, I would look for a particular file that has all the textures for a certain monster, and most of the time they would be in pieces. I would have to carefully piece them together just to form a single frame, and then do it again for the next. Eventually, with Rebirth, I was lucky enough that I could get the sprites using the Monster Book, since their idle animations would play and I can grab a perfect-sized image without needing to do a whole lot of clean-up. It would still need to be done frame by frame, but the process was a lot simpler. Only problem at that point was how I was going to get the other animations, since I would need to repeat what I did with Destiny; except like there, there are enemies I can't keep good track on how many frames they have or get the pieces to fit just right. That left me thinking I'd have to wait until much later in the project to really work on getting the enemies done and just settle for using idle animations the whole time. That is...until now.

How It's Going

Recently, various people, including those who've worked with Life Bottle Productions have been working on a new tool(s) that can extract sprites from various 2D Tales games (like the PS2, DS, and PSP games) and put the pieces together. I don't know how exactly it works, especially since it includes the playable party characters (and they have weapons), but from the looks of it, entire frames of animation are made and stored in dedicated folders assigned to those characters and such. With the PS2 games at least, the sprites would be under a certain file type that isn't easy to find or extract from; though with the recently made tool (that's also still in development), they were finally able to pull it off. At the moment, they have extracted most (if not all) battle sprites from Rebirth and Narikiri Dungeon X. So that saves me a ton of time and effort, as now (because of how they're organized), I just have to crop and resize them before sending them to Dragonbones so that I can properly edit them into a working animation.

Going Forward

While I wait and see if the Destiny sprites get extracted and loaded for all to use, I will start using what is available to me now and implement them as I work on the game. Just as I will with the playable characters (Vera is almost done), any enemies that I can get a hold of that I can get sprites for, I will put in.

Wrap-Up

As I get back into working on the game, I will think of what to do for the next Arena Demo update. With Vera being close to having her basic animations done, I want to start implementing a play-style for her as I've done with the others, and I would like to try out any new enemy animations I can put together into the demo as well. I have a ton to play with now, and I'm very grateful for the ones who put that tool together.