How do I make a sprite shake?

The goal is to temporarily shake a sprite, by just a few pixels, for a short amount of time.

One example is how old beat-em-ups would shake a sprite on impact (seen here in Final Fight)

There are some old forum links about it, but I couldn't find a concrete answer that didn't include a plugin.

Thanks for any advice!

I know you just said "doesn't include a plugin", but have you thought about writing your own plugin to do it?

It would be pretty much a boiler plate behaviour with an action that makes the instance twitch a little bit by moving the X and Y coordinates. You could even add a couple of parameters to it to control how long the shaking should take and what the range of the shake should be.

It's a perfect candidate for a behaviour.

Your confidence in my abilities is much appreciated! :) It sounds like you're right, but coding a plug-in is too far above my programming pay grade.

I imagine it's possible with tweens or timers, but as you say it seems like a much more elegant (and I'd hoped, event-based) solution exists.

Though maybe someone with more power than I could accomplish your idea!

You just move the sprite to self.x+value and back, repeat a few times.

You can make a basic attempt by doing something like this

set to self.x+10

wait 0.1 seconds

set to self.x-10

wait 0.1 seconds

set to self.x+10

wait 0.1 seconds

set to self.x-10

Or you can put it in a function, replace the 10 and 0.1 with parameters to define the distance and how quickly it shakes.

Thanks lionz! This has helped a ton, and I've just adapted it to use timers (so I can pause the game mid-shake).

And DiegoM, it was really helpful thinking about it as a behaviour, and making sure it could fit any object in the family.

Cheers to you both!