At the request of some people, I have decided to provide a tutorial on how to create idle animations during battle.
inserts Spectre song here
As I suspected, I am not the very first person in existence to discover this mechanic. In fact, this is used in the vanilla GBA games in very small quantities (Fae hovering without transforming, Kishuna unused battle animations). However, due to the lack of a dedicated tutorial from what I could find combined with not seeing it being used in ROM hacks that I’ve seen, I have decided to make this tutorial regardless for those who want to learn more.
First things first, as this involves obviously editing the battle animations, this will cause some hurdles with classes that involve hard coded commands during their battle animations. This includes all of the magic-based classes which utilize the “cloak flowing” command as well as the Hero and Assassin classes. Because of this, it may be better to not implement idle animations for the aforementioned classes unless you plan to circumvent the ASM coding via other methods.
Anyways, the sections you’ll want to direct your attention to in terms of creating idle animations are Section 9, 10, and 11. For this tutorial, I will be using the frames of my Uhai idle animation.
It is very important to note that each of these sections are activated in different scenarios. Section 9 is activated when said unit is attacking with melee animations. Section 11 is activated when the unit is attacking with ranged animations. Section 10 is the most standout one here as this is only activated when the unit in question is unequipped and cannot attack.
Because of this, it is not necessary to create any frames in Section 10 for idle animations which involve attacking with a weapon. Conversely, it is not necessary to make frames for section 9 and 11 for idle animations that are only used when the unit is unequipped. After all, it’s always better to save yourself some time and effort when you can.
Some other important rules of thumb are to include the code 1 command of “wait for HP depletion” at the end of each idle animation section. Additionally, the first frame of each section should be higher than 1. The sections of idle animations begin playing immediately at the start of each combat, regardless of whether there is dialogue being spoken or not. Thus, if the first frame of the idle animation is not delayed by a decent amount of frames, the unit in question will proceed to spasm rapidly through their first idle animation frames whenever they enter combat. Personally, I always make the first frame last 60 frames for safety purposes, but you can choose to lower this duration at your own peril.
Finally, remember that the sections of idle animations automatically loop themselves while they are active. There is no need to add any commands to loop frames.
I hope this little mechanic can help people add a touch more flavor to their ROM hacks. I personally enjoy making these so that players can watch them as units converse with each other during battle dialogue.
Yours truly,
Jason