Scout Drone — workshop

21×14 hover-drone sprite — 2-frame idle bob and a 4-frame sensor-scan loop, drawn from an editable character map.

A small saucer-hulled scout drone: antenna, twin stub fins, a ringed lens for an eye, and a hover-light bar underneath that keeps it grounded while the hull bobs above it. Two animation loops — an idle hover (amber lens, gentle bob) and a sensor scan (lens flips cyan, the light bar sweeps left-right-left).

Reuse

export/scout-sheet.png — 126×14 strip, six 21×14 frames in order: idle-0, idle-1, scan-0, scan-1, scan-2, scan-3.
scout-{idle,scan}-*.png — the individual frames.
scout@8x.png — prescaled 8× hero shot for docs/previews.

Render at integer scales with nearest-neighbor filtering or the edges smear. Idle plays at 2 fps, scan at 6 fps (ANIMATIONS in the module carries both).

Source

No .aseprite — the canonical source is source/scout-drone.mjs: a framework-free ES module holding the pixel grids as character maps (one char per pixel, palette at the top). Edit a grid and regenerate everything with:

node source/render.mjs

(needs site/node_modules installed — the script resolves Playwright from there.) That one command rewrites export/, media/, thumb.png, and the demo’s bundled copy of the module, so nothing drifts.

How the frames are built

A frame is two layers composited on the 21×14 canvas: the GLOW bar (drawn first, anchored at a fixed GLOW_Y — the hover-light stays on the ground), then the DOME drawn over it at the frame’s bob offset. The lens ring shape never moves — only its core color (E cells, remapped per frame via frame.core) and the glow bar’s bright/dim pattern (frame.glow) change, so six frames come from one hull grid and four small glow-bar variants instead of six full redraws.

Gotchas

validateGrids() throws if any row isn’t exactly 21 chars, or a frame references a missing glow pattern or core color — call it after editing, or just run render.mjs, which calls it first.
demo/scout-drone.js is generated. Edit source/scout-drone.mjs and re-render.
The demo draws the sprite from the character maps at runtime, fine at this size. A game should blit scout-sheet.png instead.

Port notes

paintFrame is ~20 lines of grid walking with no DOM dependency beyond a 2D context — same shape as mech-strider’s — so a DragonRuby port translates directly: keep the grids as strings, map cells to args.outputs.solids, or just consume scout-sheet.png as a spritesheet with source_x = frame * 21.