Battle Graphics

The below should be regarded as "Future Plans" due to the work requirements.

Attempting to bring the RPG out of the text-based or static image era, and into the age of dynamic graphics using JavaScript (or CoffeeScript) and HTML5 canvas. It's widely-supported among all browsers nowadays so there's no issue with doing it.

I'd like to bring in most features seen in sideways SNES RPGs, like the following:

• Sprites on both sides, monsters may or may not be animated. Even characters may not be, initially, depending on how many sprites we have.

• Weapon graphics, and maybe shields. Would be nice to have weapon swing animations, drawn either behind or in front of the character sprite depending on which hand it's wielded.

• Visible status effects - maybe some kind of spinning bird sprite for confusion, sprite flashes for protect/shell, etc.

• Battle animations - not exactly sure how this will turn out, especially for editing. Would like to use PNGs, but apparently no animated PNG spec has caught on strong. May have an Animation Editor in the admin with an interface for uploading and combining PNG files into animation frames. Animations would then be compiled into a spritesheet containing all images used, alongside some JSON describing each frame (sprites - with position/scale/rotation info, frame length). Less-complex animations (sword swing, spinning birds, poison bubbles) could likely just use a single spritesheet where each sprite is an animation frame. May eventually need a good way to combine the sheets so browsers have less files to download.