Animations in 2D Games

[sivvrianBARRY]

Hey everyone. I'm in the middle of a 4 week game design course at the University of Arts in Philly that I'm enjoying a lot. I had zero experience in any kind of programming or whatever going into it so I'm really having a great time learning about all this stuff.

Anyway my question was about how the animations in 2D wrestling games like the Fire Pro Wrestling work. Basically any character (there are hundreds) can do the same exact moves. I'm extremely ignorant about animations and the types of programs used to make them, but I want to know how they can use the same animation for different characters. Obviously they don't draw every character doing every frame of every move, so there is some kind of 2D skeleton involved, but I'm clueless as to how to make one or if that's even correct.

I ask because I'm thinking of making a wrestling influeneced 2D side scrolling beat 'em up (similar to Streets of Rage) in my spare time.

If anyone can point me towards a program that can make animations like those in Fire Pro I'd appreciate it a lot.

[Dirk Delshire]

I'm not sure about that game. But in a lot of SNES,NES,GEN, ect. they had a lot of small cubes that make up the sprites for each charactor. For example In the orignal SMB Mario was cut into four pieces two for his head and upper body and two for his lower half. By combining them you could make lots of different animations and save space at the same time. I'm not sure about that game, But all the wrestlers probably shared the same body sprites with diferrent heads or color scemes to change the charactor. A lot of old games used the same sprites that had an engine ingame that changed the color scemes too.  

[awesomeasapossum]

When using the Games Factory in making my games I usually use the same character and then personalize it. (Sometimes I personalize some premade characters.) Dirks answer is the best but just thought that I'd throw my two cents in too.