Frame By Frame

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  The menu! This is where you decide what magic is going to happen!

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  The drawing screen! This is where the magic happens!

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  The setting! This is where you tweak the magic!

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  The projects viewer! This is where you watch the magic you made!

Inspiration

For approximately 8 years now I've been making animations on and off. Eventually, I decided that I may not be the best animator out there, but I love animation, and I love coding, so why not combine the two and create the tools that enable an animator to make something amazing?

What it does

It is a simple drawing program that allows you to draw my frames in sequence and then export them as a gif.

How I built it

I'm using a C# Game development framework called Monogame. It typically isn't used for something like this, but with this framework, I was able to utilize the main game loop, and also easily take care of creating textures.

Challenges I ran into

Being restricted to Monogame stuff made it hard to be able to save animation data for future editing. Normally I could serialize the data, but the Monogame Texture2D classes can't easily be serialized.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I'm very proud of how everything fits together. All of the different parts from drawing, to exporting, to animating all come together and make something that actually seems like the start of an animation program.

What I learned

Trust yourself. There were a lot of features where it was primarily me coming up with the implementation, i. e. I wasn't consulting a tutorial at all. I've been doing this major for now going on three years; I know a thing or two.

What's next for Frame By Frame

I definitely want to continue the project. I've been wanting to make an animation program for so long, and I've finally started it. There's a lot of room for improvement be it with UI design, or new features. I believe that Frame By Frame can become something even greater.

Built With

• c#
• monogame