Inchworm Animation Review for Flipnote Fans

As many of you likely know, and many likely do not know, Flipnote Studio is not the only DSiWare animation app out there. And since Flipnote can't be transferred to the Nintendo 3DS, and Flipnote Studio has been delayed for almost a year, this great little tool called Inchworm Animation is the only animation tool you can use on a 3DS. Is this good news, or bad news for Flipnote fans? Well, it's ultimately up to you to decide, as the application has its positives and negatives, but personally, I love Inchworm!

First off: based on drawing tools alone, Inchworm is far more powerful than the bare-bones Flipnote Studio. Sure, Flipnotes have their charm with their low resolution and limited color scheme. But in Inchworm, you can use basically unlimited colors. You can choose between a "fuzzy" (smooth) and "hard" (pixellated) brush, and set the size of the brush. You can paint with solid colors or patterns. Many patterns are included but you can create your own patterns as well. You can copy and paste selections, set your brush's transparency, and even set the size of your canvas to something much larger or smaller than the DSi screen. (Unfortunately, you can't zoom out to see the entire canvas if it is bigger than the screen.) My favorite feature is the Over-Under tool, which allows you to choose if your marks will appear above or below existing lines. This is perfect for filling in shapes, although there is also a fill bucket tool that even works decently when using fuzzy lines.

The animation tools are of equally high quality. You can hand-draw each frame, or copy and paste sections between frames. You can also have several layers animating independent of each other. For example, if you add a background to your drawing, you don't have to copy and paste it onto every frame. Instead, you can put it on its own layer with one frame. Since the new layer only has one frame, it will show that image for the entire animation.

Inchworm offers an impressive variety of animation methods. Hand-drawn not your style? Inchworm offers options to use the system's cameras to record stop-motion animation, video, and time lapse video. If you so desire, you can trace each frame to create a rotoscoped animation from your video, leading to some cool results.

Inchworm is not without its shortcomings, however. Inchworm doesn't allow audio, so your exports will be silent, unless you use another program to add music or audio. Also, you can't control the framerate your animation will play at. The software simply flips through the pages as fast as it can. This will make simple drawings move too fast, and complex projects appear far too slow. When you export to an SD card, you can set it to play at any frame rate you want, and that's how it will appear when you upload it to the gallery--but until then, you really don't know how it will look once finished.

Speaking of exporting and uploading, these are two of the weakest areas of the software. Because of Nintendo's requirements, you can only save to the SD card, and not read from it. Since the save space is so limited, you may end up deleting unfinished projects to make room for new ones. Once saved to the SD card, you can upload your art to the online Inchworm gallery, to be admired by the world, or so the theory goes. Inchworm's gallery avoids all the problems Hatena had by simply not including the ability to add stars, follow artists, write comments, like animations, or basically interact with anyone at all. It's nice that they included the ability to upload, but a little more functionality would be appreciated as well.

My "studio": http://www.inchwormanimation.com/studio/sfz95/#3111
An amazing animator's studio: http://www.inchwormanimation.com/studio/wayne/#3045

Of course, all of these shortcomings can be excused when you realize that you can create pretty amazing animations with Inchworm Animation. If you're looking for the fun social experience Flipnote Hatena offered, you're better off using Colors! 3D or waiting for FS3D to finally leave Japan. But if you're looking for a solid, affordable animation app that you can take on the go to hone your animation skills, look no further than Inchworm Animation. Download it now!

And hey, I emailed the developer, and he expressed interest in bringing a new version of Inchworm to the 3DS--this time with sound! If you want it too, let him know!

Note: This is not a problem with Inchworm itself, but it still bears mentioning. Since it is a DSiWare game, Inchworm Animation will be "stretched" to fit the higher-resolution screen if you run it on a 3DS or 3DS XL, making images appear more blurry and crappy in general. The same happens with all DS games. You can hold "start" or "select" when you open the application (or any DS game) to make it run at its original resolution, but unless you have a 3DS XL, this makes it appear extremely small.