Sir Blastalot

PlataGO! is a level editor that allows its users  to dive straight into creating 2D platformers levels using the built-in resources. With this project, I aim to create a brand new pack of free resources that could be used with PlataGO!'s constraints.

Every game needs a main character, or at least something the player can control. Oh yeah changed Sir to Lord. I already have a character that I'd like to reanimante one day, Sir Serell and I think that Lord Blastalot has a better ring =)

PlataGO! main character(s)

Indeed, PlataGO! has 2 main characters implemented, and you can choose which one will be the player's avatar. By default, one is a boy the other is a girl, but they both have the exact same number of animations.

Let's dive into that right away:

The main character comes with about a dozen different animations. The tool doesn't give them names, so I came up with my own names: Idle, Walk, Jump, Fall, Land, Climb, Die, Teleport and Jetpack.

Notice that PlataGO! does not have a shoot animation. The character will remain static when they shoot, even if the 8 directions shooting mode is enabled (however I won't cover that yet, maybe later, because it has no impact on modding the character sprites)
The MC (for Main Character) also doesn't have an idle pose when they are idling on a ladder. When the do, they use their static ground idle animation.

It's a bit strange of a choice when you know that the character sprite sheet has 4 idle animations.

A word on the idling system

When the player doesn't enter any inputs, the character on screen will use it's Idling animation. If the player continue to wait for whatever reason, the character will then randomly switch to one of the three other animations.
By default, the standard idling animation is one single static frame. Then it will choose between, blinking, impatient and bored. Then I'm not sure, but I think it chooses randomly again which animation to play.

SpriteSheet animations listing

A quick look at sprite sheet and we can determine each animation's frames number:

- Idle A = 1 frame
- Idle B = 5 frames
- Idle C = 10 frames
- Idle D = 10 frames

- Walk = 6 frames

- Jump = 3 frames
- Fall = 2 frames

- Land = 3 frames

- Climb = 4 frames

- Die = 5 frames

- Teleport = 5 frames

- Jetpack = 4 frames

NOTE: While testing stuff out, I noticed that the walk animation is actually 5 frames long, tha last one being skipped for some reason, probably a bug. It is rather inconvenient when a standard looping walk cycle is 6 frames... This is something we'll have to live with, unless a miracle happens and the development of PlataGO! continues...

Sprite Size

Each frame here is 64 x 64 pixels. However, you'll notice that the character - and the other entities - are actually UPSCALED from their original resolution. My recommendation is to build the sprite sheet in the original 1:1 pixel ratio on a 32x32 grid, then upscaling it by 200% to fit into the 64x64 grid.
Of course, you can directly draw bigger characters that natively fit the 64x64 grid, but you'll have then to draw bigger sprites for all the other elements if you want to keep consistency.
I have created a placeholder grid, that you can (and should) use to align your new sprites.
You will also find a 64 x 64 character grid, as well as the whole entities atlas with corresponding placeholder grids.

I took some time to create a placeholder spritesheet so I can observe and study how PlataGO! plays the main character animations