I plan to post a little thing about it on Craftster, but I’ll share what I did here too. It actually didn’t take too long, probably not as long as any bigger piece–I think it was just 4-5 frames of a ~16×16 pixel sprite, which I captured while playing Joust on an emulator.

I stitched all the sprites on the same piece of black Aida fabric, each with a 16 stitch wide bottom white line for reference, then simply took a picture of the whole thing. Scanning would have been better, but my scanner died some time ago.

Then in a photo editor, I drew a 100px horizontal line to help me correctly align, scale, and slice each of the sprites into individual frames. I believe it was just 4-5 frames, with the frame that had the legs crossing getting used twice. Slap them together in a GIF animation program and play with the frame delay (equal time for each frame) until you like what you see. That’s it!

I’d love to do or see more Joust 8-bit xstitches, those little cute (but evil) knights are begging to be stitched. The colorful ostrich mounts, cool rock formations, and the dreaded lava also look quite nice on the stark black background.

I think all the 8-bit stuff lends itself well to animated projects, since those basic animations used a small number of frames. Though one day I may have to make a Ken or Ryu dragon punch anim from Street Fighter series. I’m not sure I’m crazy enough to take on such a project, so I’ll just put the idea out there.