Let's Play D&D

(Dogs and Dragons)

08/22-24/2017

Agenda

  1. Brain warm up
  2. Review CS vocabulary
  3. Review motion
  4. Review the history of animated sprites
  5. Practice animating Sprites with Lab 1.4
  6. Extract Sprites from gifs

OBJECTIVE: Animate SNAP sprites using costume changes and movement. Trigger action in other sprites using broadcasts.

As you enter the room, please begin today's Brain Warm Up

Important Links

Meeting with Chip:

https://meet.lync.com/teals/williamvaughn/F0679QJD

Snap

Brain Warm Up

Observe this looping video of an antique basketball game. When do you think this game was made?

Knowing what you know about programming:

  • How many sprites do you think this game uses?
  • Without thinking of any programming language consider in plain English the algorithms involved. How are points determined? What controls the motion of the ball? etc etc
  • What Snap! blocks could you use to make this game? Is it even possible to make this game in Snap!?
  • Imagine the scripts you could combine to create this sort of gameplay.

First human sprites in a game.

Sprite Sheets

Sprite Sheets in Action

Turning gif & sprite sheets into images for animation


Install the following in order:

  1. Adobe Air - Needed before you can use ShoeBox
  2. ShoeBox - Convert Gifs to Image collections

Once those are finished being downloaded and installed. Open the ShoeBox (step 2) program. Go find a gif or sprite sheet you want to make into an animation you can control. Then depending on what you find drag it to the right block in ShoeBox (instructions pictured below).

Drag gifs to the Ani Frames block of the program and it will turn the gif into a series of images


Drag sprite sheets to the Extract Sprites block to turn a sprite sheet like the girl running above and auto-magically convert it into a series of images.

Finding your own resources

To find your own sprite sheets search google with commands like: "Mega Man sprite sheet"

Here is a phenomenal resource that has tons of sprite sheets:

https://www.spriters-resource.com/

and here is a database of characters for a custom fighting game called MUGEN, the character pages will have links to animations that you can use as your own sprites:

http://mugen.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Characters

and as for gifs.... don't tell me you all don't know how to find gifs.

Turning videos into gifs

This site allows you to upload or link to a video in order to make a gif from it.

https://giphy.com/create/gifmaker

Deleting solid color backgrounds of images in Snap!


Grabbing images from your computer screen

Windows computers all come with a software called "Snipping Tool". This allows you to cut out pieces of your screen and save them as an image. Anything that gets displayed on your monitor is fair game to be taken and used within a Snap! program.

Extra Sprite.xml