As metioned previously the Amiga simply can’t load in the amount of animation frames we need for 4 characters at any one time.
It’s actually worse than I previously calculated, I said we could do about 110 frames but it’s actually gonna be closer to 30-40 as I wasn’t taking into account the duplicates within those frames.
Scorpion doesn’t currently support joining bits together, as this would be a solution that would increase our frame count.
As currently we wouldn’t be able to support lifting the barrel as it’s 4 frames. Which is now alot of our budget. But if we were able to join the walking legs with a static lift torso, that would then be easily doable.
So our budget comes down to about 20 frames for player and 10 per enemy, which is rather limited. But I have been able to reduce the amount of map tiles by a third with hardly any visual difference.
We can however be artistic with how we use the limited animation frames, to still get a good feel.
For example:
Walking is something that currently takes 8 frames (4 for nomral and another 4 when moving up), which x4 charcters at once is 32 frames. I think we can reduce this by 3/4. See below, walking right is the 2 frame version, walking left is 4 frames.
For the attacks, Billy has a total of 16 frames for his punch / kick combos, I have reduced this to 7, by removing the 2nd punch variation and instead of the 5 frame roundhouse finisher he will just uppercut instead.