Sprite animation switching

[petersbob]

Hello, 

The game I am working on involves the sprite switching out body parts as it picks up objects. I am looking for advice for a better way to do this type of animation. The head, torso, arms, or legs change depending on what has been picked up. The initial version of the game involved lots of sprite sheets. Despite their being only 2 different versions of each body parts, 16 sprite sheets were made (one for every possible combination of the character). This was very inefficient.

We have tried using dragon bones to do the animation, but that has been a bit confusing for my artist to figure out.

People who have done this sort of thing before, what do you recommend?

Here is an early prototype to get an idea of what we are trying to do. Pick up the yellow balls change the body parts.

 https://0b043e46a6a6cbc07bff91cb5b7a4fad196bd008.googledrive.com/host/0Byrv0RL7M6RYTnJGa281aTctY1k/

[Shantred]

I have not done this before with Phaser, but could you not just make the interchangeable parts different sprites and attach them as children? Then you could pretty easily apply animations/movement to them and just destroy and add new ones in their place as needed.

Edit: It looks like there's a (somewhat impractical) example of this in the examples section: http://phaser.io/examples/v2/sprites/child-sprites

[petersbob]

That is a good idea. It might be bit confusing getting different view of the character working, but I'll see how that works.