If it's one thing that has been a common theme in my work it's bad graphics. I can't draw to save my life and everybody who has seen my futile attempts knows this. I just don't have a good head for arranging the elements of a figure. I wind up with bodies out of proportion, faces that look like over sized emoticons, and weird looking eyes that just don't feel right.

So here I am thinking that the flixel February thing would be perfect for someone of my artistic talent.

ROFLS

My first pass at sprite graphics looked so bad even at pitiful sizes of at most 24x24 pixels made me feel like I was 5 years old hoping that mommy would put it on the refrigerator. It hit me when I realized that I wanted a serpentine dragon that animated in a spiral. I wanted it to look like it was spiraling forward. After several attempts I gave up realizing that I just couldn't translate the image in my head to a physical reality. Space just doesn't seem to match up when I mentally zoom in on a detail to render it on physical medium.

Ultimately I abandoned the sprites in favor of something more dynamic. I created a system that would allow me to assemble a dragon out of a selection of parts. The dragon now had hand drawn head and wing graphics, but that's it. The body is animated through the use of small scale physics. It behaves like a rag doll with the tail moving about depending on how the head is moving. I think it looks a hell of a lot better than my pathetic attempts at hand drawing stuff. With the new system I can make dragons of arbitrary length and have their bodies and tails move in more flowing manner, something I could never get with static frames of poorly drawn sprite animation. This will allow me to have a wider array of recognizable enemies with different behaviors without having to spend time drawing all of them.