![8 bit super mario running 8 bit super mario running](https://www.8bitcraft.com/images/sprites/super-mario-3-small-mario-standing.jpg)
If something is not rigidly tethered, give it gravity after impact and so on. If something moves every frame, make another thing move 2 frames. If one thing is moving left, make another thing move up. With so few frames it is important to have a lot going on. However these 8 frames seemed out of place with the overall NES+ feel, so cutting them back helped a lot. I tried a lavish 8 frames… with modern gaming technology we are not limited in any way, the walk cycle could be 20,000 frames and modern hardware wouldn’t miss a beat. In this article we want to keep the NES aesthetic, with a little bit of “Plus”. So if it’s NES+, how about Ping-Pong-Plus?
![8 bit super mario running 8 bit super mario running](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/03/Super_Mario_Bros._box.png)
They would throw their entire budget on the main sprite, this can be seen in games like Moon Crystal and Batman III. Later NES games had to concentrate on wowing new customers, from strong competition in the console wars that raged in the late 20th century. Games like Mega Man, Ducktales and Metroid all used this technique. In the end, this is what most games opted for, two specific frames and one re-usable frame, then ping pong the animation. The lower frame rate of the walkcycle probably helped mask the Sticky Pixels artefact.
![8 bit super mario running 8 bit super mario running](https://i.joecomp.com/img/game/496/how-to-beat-super-mario-run-and-fully-expand-your-kingdom_10.jpg)
This animation suffers greatly from “sticky pixels” around the hand area and the middle of the legs. Castlevania split the sprites up so legs and torso could have independent states for attacks so this might be a reason why. This one from Castlevania III uses a middle frame, and again is a ping pong cycle, which uses an Idle frame (4th). This walk cycle is far more optimised that the classic from Mario 1. Technically this walk cycle is only 2 frames but the way the frames are used makes it look like 4. Firstly they are re-using the Idle pose to add more frames to the loop, and then reusing frame 2 as frame 4 to add even more frames.
![8 bit super mario running 8 bit super mario running](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/f8j3CU6dWFQ/hqdefault.jpg)
3 they have opted for two tile space saving techniques. So in this example from Super Mario Bros. Mario only has this on top of his shoulder, which is fine. This is when a pixel or cluster of pixels of the same colour are unmoving or unchanging through all the frames. One thing to avoid when making walk cycles with a small amount of frames is “persistent pixels” or sticky pixels. The trick here is to not provide any shading so the legs interchange with one another making the back leg and front leg use the same frames. This is a classic walk cycle, that just plays linearly. Lets start with the most famous of them all, Super Mario Bros. With some fancy memory swapping these 128×128 sheets could be swapped out or even generated on the fly, the earlier games stuck to that one sheet for sprites and the animations had to be tight to fit on the sheet. Mimicking NES hardware in indie games is key to getting an 8-bit feel.Īll NES games had the luxury of a 128×128 pixel sprite-sheet that was broken down in to tiles.
#8 BIT SUPER MARIO RUNNING HOW TO#
We take a look why NES games used a 4 frame walk cycle and muse on how to carry those techniques through to modern games