Maaaaaaan, I was working on this cool update today that I wanted to show off, but now I have to go out and I haven’t finished it. So let me tell you all about Paint of Persia instead.

Back in the late 80’s/early 90’s, there was this animation technique that was semi-common in 2D games called rotoscoping. It basically boils down to filming something, then tracing over each frame to create a fluid animation.

It was popularised by Jordan Mechner for the game Prince of Persia, in which Mechner’s teen brother was filmed hurling himself around the local highschool, then drawn over and scanned into the game.

Here’s a really fantastic talk by Mechner, where he talks about the process (along with basically his whole life story).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyw6_G1lbvg

The technique was used in a bunch of games after this; Flashback, Another World, The Last Express, but fell out of favour once horrible-looking early 3D games started to dominate the sales charts.

But now it’s back, baby! Pretty much the impetus for the whole art style of Desert Child can be attributed to my finding the animation tool Paint of Persia.

Paint of Persia is a super simple rotoscoping tool that I’ve used for the majority of animations in Desert Child. Without it, I don’t think I would be able to have any of the cool perspective drawings, as I’m really not a good enough animator to have animated all the different angles of the walk cycles by hand.

While you could argue that Photoshop or Gimp are just as usefull, if not more (since they have like a billion other tools you can use), Paint of Persia is by far the simplest and most time efficient.

Whereas in Photoshop, you would need to import video frames into the program to then draw over them, Paint of Persia just creates a transparent canvas, meaning you can literally just position it over a youtube video you’ve found, and trace over it. It’s genius.

Additionally, Paint of Persia can export to spritesheets, making it the perfect partner tool for Asperite (another animation tool I use to add more detail to animations) and for just importing into your choice of game engine.

If you have any interest in animation, please check it out, it’s fantastic!

Paint of Persia: https://dunin.itch.io/ptop