It turns out programming the animation of the sprite is the easy part. The tough part: Actually drawing the thing! I've been racking my brain trying to "figure out" how to draw these guys. I didn't mean that as a pun either, I put it in quotes because it's like I'm trying to rationally come up with something workable.

I'm no stranger to photoshop, or illustrator; I supported myself during college doing freelance graphic and web design. But you can get pretty far in the design world if you have a good understanding of color and layout. Animation is something different, you have to really understand form... and I've never taken a figure drawing class, or any formal hand drawing class for that matter.

So far it's been pretty tough, as you can probably tell from my first attempt at the main character. Granted it is a first attempt. but that's just a still picture, not an series of pictures intended to give the impression of walking! Time for plan 'B', use someone else's work as a base. I can't tell you what a fan I am of the Creative Commons license. And I was even able to find a nice set of CC licensed Sprites on FlickR, but their format were to small for my needs, and that was the only sprite set I found with an open license!

So I've decided to actually use a trademarked sprite set from a commercial game to draw a basic walking form, then add on clothes, hair, etc, to make it look like Peter the Apostle. So, hopefully with will make things easier, otherwise I'll just completely wing-it and make something that looks retarded. But hey, you never know, maybe the retarded look is making a come back