Comprehensive Mechanical Guide to the Move Animator
Hey there! I play a lot of fangames, and I don’t see custom move animations very often- nor do I see many resources offering any help in this department. So, I figured, why not make the whole process easier by making a tutorial for users new to the idea?
If you’d like a full video breakdown of essentials’ move animator system, Thundaga has a very helpful video you can find here. He covers things in a lot more detail, with video as well rather than pictures whereas I will simply be abbreviating with pictures and text.
Step 1: Opening up the Editor!
This one’s pretty simple, just open your debug menu (either through your pause menu itself or by pressing F9, then navigate to “Information Editors…” and then “Battle Animation Editor.”
This will open up a new window- this is the animator, folks! You should see a number of things- a blank default battle scene with a Pikachu and Charizard, some buttons on the right side, and a bottom panel with some sprite frames and a frame guide.
Step 2: Learning the Animator
We’ll go over each of these things one at a time.
First, is the bottom left panel. This section of the animator has 4 functions.
Frame selector: This is the top option, which has simple arrow keys to let you scroll through frames of the current animation you have selected. Try it now!
Total Frames: Clicking this will prompt you with a textbox where you can change how many frames your animation will play for. Think of it like changing your canvas size. You don’t want there to be more white space than drawing, because then it might look boring!
Set Animation Sheet: This one lets you define a graphic for your animation sheet, which means, in layman terms, what sprites you have to work with in your animation. We’ll talk more about these later!
List of animations: Clicking this option will bring up a list of every currently animated move in essentials. You should see a lot of “Move:” with a move name in capital letters. This animation name is how your game knows what animation goes to which move. For instance, if a move is named “Move:TACKLE” That tells the game that it should play that animation whenever the move Tackle is used in battle.
There are a few different types of names that you’ll see in your list if you scroll through as well. Such as “OppMove.” This name tells the game that when the move is being used by the opponent, to play that animation instead. This is helpful for moves that don’t reflect properly, like Sing or Mega Drain! You can create one of these whenever you think your move looks a bit wonky when reflected.
There are also a few animations that are labeled as “Common:” which tells the game that the animation in question is not a move, but still needs an animated effect in battle. These are called by things in the code of essentials itself, which you may or may not have edited, but exist and are referenced by the default code.
Examples of this are Leech Seed’s absorbing animation, which is not a move, but still needs an animation to play at the end of every turn. Also, status effects are part of this area- Poison still needs an animation, so does Paralysis, and so does Confusion.
Finally, there are a few animations that don’t follow the naming convention like Pin Missile hit 1 or Fly charging. These names don’t actually mean anything in the code, but they are there to tell the game “hey, these happen before the final move animation, so do these before that!”
An example of this would be Bide, which plays for 3 turns. So you would label the first animation, the one of the move hitting, as Move:BIDE, and then the 2 charging animations as whatever you feel fit to name them! The name doesn’t matter so long as they follow Bide in the animation list.
Resize Animation List: If you’re just making your first animation, you probably won’t need this, but if you’re making a few, at a certain point the animation list will be too small for the number of animations you wanna make- so make the list bigger with this option!
Okay, back to the default window.
To the right of where we just were, we’ll see two different things. 5 frames that have pictures in them- presumably. These are the graphics defined earlier in the “Set Animation Sheet” option, functioning in rows of 5. Each “frame” is in a graphics box that’s 192x192 pixels. And the frames that are available for selection are all in the Graphics > Animations folder.
Selecting one of those boxes means you have “selected” that graphic, which will either be highlighted in red or black depending on what version of Essentials you’re using and whenever you have a frame “selected” then the next cel (we’ll talk about this in a moment) you place will use that graphic.
Below those graphics, you can see the name of the current animation you have selected- isn’t that neat?
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Next, we’ll talk about “cels” which I briefly mentioned earlier. Do you see those little boxes around Pikachu and Charizard? Those are “cels!” They’re the things that make your animations move and show up in battle. Clicking on these and then pressing the “P” button will bring up a “Properties” menu.
While you’re here, a few more useful shortcuts:
Pattern: This indicates which graphic the cel uses. -2 indicates that the cel will use whatever graphic the opponent is, -1 is the same but for the “user” being whatever Pokemon the player has out at the time. 0 will be the first graphic in your animation sheet, 1 will be the second, and so on. Right next to the box on the right is a display of what the cel will look like, to scale, so it’s a helpful visual reference.
XY positions: Indicate where on your screen the cel will be.
Zoom X/Y: This lets you select how large your graphic will be. By default, this is 100 by 100.
Angle: Indicates the rotation, if any, to the graphic in your cel. By default, this is 0.
Opacity: How opaque, or rather, how visible your sprite is. 0 Is invisible, while 255 is the max and will make your sprite totally opaque.
Blending: Selects the blending type the graphic uses. I don’t recommend setting this to anything other than 0 unless you need it for a specific type of animation. 1 is white-centric, 2 is inverse blending, and 0 is the default.
Flip: Decides whether or not your graphic will appear flipped.
Priority: This decides whether your cel shows up in front or behind other cel graphics. By default, the cel with the largest cel number will show up on top.
Focus: This option mostly comes into play when flipping your animation for the opponent to use the move. The target indicates how the move gets flipped.
User: The cel will be focused on the user’s position, whether that be opponent or you.
Target: The cel will focus on the target, again whoever that may be.
User and Target: Useful for moves that don’t flip at all, and also the default for the user and opponent cels themselves. Useful for things like beams that travel from one to the other.
Screen: The cel will not flip, and is intended to stay static regardless of being flipped. Useful for moves like Trick Room or weather.
Set Blending Color: Similar to the Blending option, this option decides how your graphic blends. This is fairly self explanatory. Red increases/decreases how red your sprite is, Green does the same but for green, and blue does the same but for blue. The alpha layer will typically describe how dark the color mask is on your graphic.
Set Color Tone: Same as above.
Okay, the last section, I promise. To the right of the screen are a few more options. I’ll go over each of these one by one, just like the ones before.
SE and BG: This brings up a menu where you can display backgrounds and play sound effects! You can even select which frames those happen on, though I personally recommend frame 1 for any sound effects you may be wanting to implement.
Cel Focus: This doesn’t indicate any cel specifically, but will apply to any new cel you place onto the canvas itself.
Paste Last: This option will paste everything on the frame before it to this frame as well.
Copy Frames is similar to this option but will let you select multiple frames instead of a single frame and also select where you paste them to.
Clear Frames: This will clear frames of your selection of any cels not numbered 0 (the player’s Pokemon sprites) or 1 (the opponent).
Tweening: Lets you select 2 separate frames, usually a few frames apart from each other, and a set of cels to “connect” using a linear curve in-between frames in a few categories such as size and opacity.
For instance, if I had a zoom 150 graphic in frame 1 and I had a zoom 100 graphic in frame 2 and I didn’t feel like going through and hand-editing 2-4’s graphic zoom sizes, I could use tweening to automatically make frame 2-4 values connecting between 150 and 100.
Cel Batch: Lets you edit the properties of multiple cels at once, cutting down on the tedium a lot of editing individual cels.
Entire Slide: Similar to tweening, you can indicate a set of frames you would like to move a certain distance on the x or y axis and end it on a certain frame. I don’t recommend use of this feature unless you are doing an animation similar to Earthquake.
Play Animation: Plays the animation you have made as-is, sound effects and background included as well.
Play Opp Animation does the same thing but applies the animation as if the opponent was using it instead.
Import Animation: This option will bring up a menu where you can import any .anm files you have in the root file of your game. Note that this will change basically everything about the animation you currently selected, such as frame count, graphics, animation sheet, sound effects, and even the animation name. Use this option with caution.
Export Animation: Lets you export the current animation you have selected as a .anm file into your root folder, which will let you share the animation with others. Note that this does not come with the animation sheet associated or the sound effects used, so you will also have to share those. This makes for a simple plug and play for others.
Help: Shows a basic list of commands able to be used when selecting a cel- you should learn these shortcuts, they’re very helpful!
Okay, that’s it for me! I hope this was helpful to those looking to start animating and learn the software. I wanted to get into the actual animating techniques here, but that’ll have to be saved for another day, and when it is finished I’ll link that here. If you need any further reading, the essentials wiki has all of this covered as well, which you can find here.
Hey there! I play a lot of fangames, and I don’t see custom move animations very often- nor do I see many resources offering any help in this department. So, I figured, why not make the whole process easier by making a tutorial for users new to the idea?
If you’d like a full video breakdown of essentials’ move animator system, Thundaga has a very helpful video you can find here. He covers things in a lot more detail, with video as well rather than pictures whereas I will simply be abbreviating with pictures and text.
Step 1: Opening up the Editor!
This one’s pretty simple, just open your debug menu (either through your pause menu itself or by pressing F9, then navigate to “Information Editors…” and then “Battle Animation Editor.”
This will open up a new window- this is the animator, folks! You should see a number of things- a blank default battle scene with a Pikachu and Charizard, some buttons on the right side, and a bottom panel with some sprite frames and a frame guide.
Step 2: Learning the Animator
We’ll go over each of these things one at a time.
First, is the bottom left panel. This section of the animator has 4 functions.
Frame selector: This is the top option, which has simple arrow keys to let you scroll through frames of the current animation you have selected. Try it now!
Total Frames: Clicking this will prompt you with a textbox where you can change how many frames your animation will play for. Think of it like changing your canvas size. You don’t want there to be more white space than drawing, because then it might look boring!
Set Animation Sheet: This one lets you define a graphic for your animation sheet, which means, in layman terms, what sprites you have to work with in your animation. We’ll talk more about these later!
List of animations: Clicking this option will bring up a list of every currently animated move in essentials. You should see a lot of “Move:” with a move name in capital letters. This animation name is how your game knows what animation goes to which move. For instance, if a move is named “Move:TACKLE” That tells the game that it should play that animation whenever the move Tackle is used in battle.
There are a few different types of names that you’ll see in your list if you scroll through as well. Such as “OppMove.” This name tells the game that when the move is being used by the opponent, to play that animation instead. This is helpful for moves that don’t reflect properly, like Sing or Mega Drain! You can create one of these whenever you think your move looks a bit wonky when reflected.
There are also a few animations that are labeled as “Common:” which tells the game that the animation in question is not a move, but still needs an animated effect in battle. These are called by things in the code of essentials itself, which you may or may not have edited, but exist and are referenced by the default code.
Examples of this are Leech Seed’s absorbing animation, which is not a move, but still needs an animation to play at the end of every turn. Also, status effects are part of this area- Poison still needs an animation, so does Paralysis, and so does Confusion.
Finally, there are a few animations that don’t follow the naming convention like Pin Missile hit 1 or Fly charging. These names don’t actually mean anything in the code, but they are there to tell the game “hey, these happen before the final move animation, so do these before that!”
An example of this would be Bide, which plays for 3 turns. So you would label the first animation, the one of the move hitting, as Move:BIDE, and then the 2 charging animations as whatever you feel fit to name them! The name doesn’t matter so long as they follow Bide in the animation list.
Resize Animation List: If you’re just making your first animation, you probably won’t need this, but if you’re making a few, at a certain point the animation list will be too small for the number of animations you wanna make- so make the list bigger with this option!
Okay, back to the default window.
To the right of where we just were, we’ll see two different things. 5 frames that have pictures in them- presumably. These are the graphics defined earlier in the “Set Animation Sheet” option, functioning in rows of 5. Each “frame” is in a graphics box that’s 192x192 pixels. And the frames that are available for selection are all in the Graphics > Animations folder.
Selecting one of those boxes means you have “selected” that graphic, which will either be highlighted in red or black depending on what version of Essentials you’re using and whenever you have a frame “selected” then the next cel (we’ll talk about this in a moment) you place will use that graphic.
Below those graphics, you can see the name of the current animation you have selected- isn’t that neat?
-
Next, we’ll talk about “cels” which I briefly mentioned earlier. Do you see those little boxes around Pikachu and Charizard? Those are “cels!” They’re the things that make your animations move and show up in battle. Clicking on these and then pressing the “P” button will bring up a “Properties” menu.
While you’re here, a few more useful shortcuts:
- Pressing l will lock or unlock the cel so that you can move it!
- Pressing e or r will rotate the cel by 10 degrees respectively.
- Pressing your arrow keys will move your cel by 8 on the x/y axis in the respective direction you pressed.
- Pressing alt + whichever arrow key only moves the cel by 1, which proves helpful when making small adjustments.
Pattern: This indicates which graphic the cel uses. -2 indicates that the cel will use whatever graphic the opponent is, -1 is the same but for the “user” being whatever Pokemon the player has out at the time. 0 will be the first graphic in your animation sheet, 1 will be the second, and so on. Right next to the box on the right is a display of what the cel will look like, to scale, so it’s a helpful visual reference.
XY positions: Indicate where on your screen the cel will be.
Zoom X/Y: This lets you select how large your graphic will be. By default, this is 100 by 100.
Angle: Indicates the rotation, if any, to the graphic in your cel. By default, this is 0.
Opacity: How opaque, or rather, how visible your sprite is. 0 Is invisible, while 255 is the max and will make your sprite totally opaque.
Blending: Selects the blending type the graphic uses. I don’t recommend setting this to anything other than 0 unless you need it for a specific type of animation. 1 is white-centric, 2 is inverse blending, and 0 is the default.
Flip: Decides whether or not your graphic will appear flipped.
Priority: This decides whether your cel shows up in front or behind other cel graphics. By default, the cel with the largest cel number will show up on top.
Focus: This option mostly comes into play when flipping your animation for the opponent to use the move. The target indicates how the move gets flipped.
User: The cel will be focused on the user’s position, whether that be opponent or you.
Target: The cel will focus on the target, again whoever that may be.
User and Target: Useful for moves that don’t flip at all, and also the default for the user and opponent cels themselves. Useful for things like beams that travel from one to the other.
Screen: The cel will not flip, and is intended to stay static regardless of being flipped. Useful for moves like Trick Room or weather.
Set Blending Color: Similar to the Blending option, this option decides how your graphic blends. This is fairly self explanatory. Red increases/decreases how red your sprite is, Green does the same but for green, and blue does the same but for blue. The alpha layer will typically describe how dark the color mask is on your graphic.
Set Color Tone: Same as above.
Okay, the last section, I promise. To the right of the screen are a few more options. I’ll go over each of these one by one, just like the ones before.
SE and BG: This brings up a menu where you can display backgrounds and play sound effects! You can even select which frames those happen on, though I personally recommend frame 1 for any sound effects you may be wanting to implement.
Cel Focus: This doesn’t indicate any cel specifically, but will apply to any new cel you place onto the canvas itself.
Paste Last: This option will paste everything on the frame before it to this frame as well.
Copy Frames is similar to this option but will let you select multiple frames instead of a single frame and also select where you paste them to.
Clear Frames: This will clear frames of your selection of any cels not numbered 0 (the player’s Pokemon sprites) or 1 (the opponent).
Tweening: Lets you select 2 separate frames, usually a few frames apart from each other, and a set of cels to “connect” using a linear curve in-between frames in a few categories such as size and opacity.
For instance, if I had a zoom 150 graphic in frame 1 and I had a zoom 100 graphic in frame 2 and I didn’t feel like going through and hand-editing 2-4’s graphic zoom sizes, I could use tweening to automatically make frame 2-4 values connecting between 150 and 100.
Cel Batch: Lets you edit the properties of multiple cels at once, cutting down on the tedium a lot of editing individual cels.
Entire Slide: Similar to tweening, you can indicate a set of frames you would like to move a certain distance on the x or y axis and end it on a certain frame. I don’t recommend use of this feature unless you are doing an animation similar to Earthquake.
Play Animation: Plays the animation you have made as-is, sound effects and background included as well.
Play Opp Animation does the same thing but applies the animation as if the opponent was using it instead.
Import Animation: This option will bring up a menu where you can import any .anm files you have in the root file of your game. Note that this will change basically everything about the animation you currently selected, such as frame count, graphics, animation sheet, sound effects, and even the animation name. Use this option with caution.
Export Animation: Lets you export the current animation you have selected as a .anm file into your root folder, which will let you share the animation with others. Note that this does not come with the animation sheet associated or the sound effects used, so you will also have to share those. This makes for a simple plug and play for others.
Help: Shows a basic list of commands able to be used when selecting a cel- you should learn these shortcuts, they’re very helpful!
Okay, that’s it for me! I hope this was helpful to those looking to start animating and learn the software. I wanted to get into the actual animating techniques here, but that’ll have to be saved for another day, and when it is finished I’ll link that here. If you need any further reading, the essentials wiki has all of this covered as well, which you can find here.
- Credits
- No credit needed!
