First of all, I'm not sure what the most relevant section for this post is. The LPC sub-forum seems to be mostly for discussions about the event itself, or the assets in general; this is more specific. If you're a moderator and feel that this thread should be moved elsewhere, please do.

Anyway, I ran into an issue with the LPC slash animation, specifically for swords (the oversized swords, not the short sword). The attached image illustrates the issue. In my game, I defined the weapon arc for the sword as "the tile the character is on, and the three tiles in front of the character that the sword passes through" (actually, one of those is debatable). This works fine for the north and side facing frames, but it's way off for the south facing sprite, because the sword never actually visibly passes through those tiles. As a result, there is a disconnect between what you see on the screen and what happens in the code.

Now, I can work around this by changing the weapon arc when attacking down, but I don't really like that solution because it breaks the symmetry in the game (it will make it harder to fight enemies at the bottom of the screen than to fight enemies at the top of the screen).

The "proper" solution, I think, would be to change the animation: if the character leans in more (as he sortof does in the side facing frames) the sword would come down and credibly pass through the tiles in question. I'm not sure doing that is within my capabilities (I'm tempted to give it a go though), but apart from that: the appeal of the LPC bases is in the vast amount of additions available for them. It would be a LOT of work to update/modify those, and unless it's something that others are likely to use/want, it's not obvious that doing this would be a good use of anybody's time.

A quick and dirty "work-around" that I may go for first is to cheat on the sword sheet and move the animation frames around a bit and extend the sword so that it does pass through those tiles (I think giving the sword its largest extension on the frame before this one will do it, because of the position of the arm). It breaks the synchronicity of the different directions, but it's probably the quickest and easiest work-around.

Does anyone have any other suggestions or ideas that I didn't think of? Has anyone else run into this issue?