Bouncing enemy 02

The Eye Of Sender

For this enemy, I'm going to replace the spiked bomb-looking bouncing metallic shape that is among the default enemies in PlataGO!
As it is a spherical enemy, I thought it would be fun to keep that shape and see what I could find on OpenGameArt.
I eventually found something very interesting in the form of The Eye of Sender, a very cool looking sprite bu Umplix.
However this time, the psrite was way too big to fit under our monsters requirements (INSERT LINK HERE to "Monsters guidelines").

The original sprite being a 168 x 168, it is way too large to maintain our graphical and pixel ration consistency. I had to drastically scale it down into a fitting 32x32 sprite.
Of course I lost a lot of the original details in the process:

But that didn't stopped me, and I adapted the downscaled version to the Dawnbringer 32 clor palette. I had to redraw the sprite to make it look similar to it's higher resolution counter part.

To my knowledge, PlataGO! doesn't allow custom animation states, so this bouncing enemy just loops it's animation.
Knowing that, I came up with the idea of opening the eye's iris. I draw the extra frames, and even added a small reflection when the iris is wide open.

Some animation constraints

My spritesheet would eventually look like that:

I made it intentional to have 2 frames wide open so it lasts a little longer, then the iris closes faster than it opens.
However, once importad into Platago, I noticed that there is acually a pause in the animation timing, and I ended up with that in the editor:

Notice how long the iris stays when it's closed! It stays closed for a far longer time! This means that there is some code running in PlataGO that forces the first frame to last longer than the others.
(Sidenote: I'd be curious to know if the first frame is just copied? is it repeated, or is there some hidden state machine behind that?)
So I then just reworked the order of the frames in order to have the iris wide open as the first frame.

I would also be able to not skip frames during the closing of the iris this time, allowing for a smoother animation :D

For comparison, just for fun jere is an animation where all frames are the exact same duration:

The feeling is not the same at all!

To finish, a sidenot to myself:
Even though PlataGO! does not allow a lot of enemy customization, I had an idea here for that monster: it could be vulnerable only when it's eye is wide open and it would be impervious to bullets otherwise.