How to increase canvas animation length independent of specific loops

I’m having some trouble figuring out how to create the title-screen for the game I’m currently making for a school project and I’m completely new to animating pixel-art and to aseprite.
Firstly, I don’t know how to phrase this to make my question understandable, so bear with me.
This is how the title-screen looks right now in .gif form:

titlescreen6

So, each asset on the screen has its specific loops, the fish and the jellyfish for example. I made the whole gif 63 frames long because the fish needed that long of an animation. The jellyfish however only has around 14 frames (seven frames but they are in doubles to make the animation longer).
There are like 8 or something loops in total, all of different lengths.

So, now - my issue is that I want a whale in the background to move the entire length of the canvas. However, 63 frames is too little to make that animation long enough to be satisfying, which means I need to increase the length of the animation to accomodate that. And that would mean I would have to duplicate each assets loops an additional time, but they don’t have the same amount of frames. Is there any way to tag specific layers and specific frames as one “loop” and copy that out?

I just don’t really have a clue on how to go about it, so I would appreciate someone giving me a couple of pointers if possible ^^ I’ll answer any questions regarding my topic ofc, and I could only post one embed, so I hope the gif’s enough.

ps. I hope this is the right place for this. ds

Also, any technical points to how I could make the titlescreen better/prettier would also be appreciated :slight_smile:

The animation system is not much more advanced than just being a series of images in a row that gets played. Timing multiple animations for a loop can be a bit tricky but there might be certain animations you can just delay off screen for a few frames or something to make it fit.
I’m not sure what you mean with tagging and copying out really but there is a tag system (press F2 after selecting a range of frames) but this is really just for looping a section to see for yourself or for exporting specific sections.

I would just recommend selecting all your cels and selecting Frame -> Duplicate cels which will just double the animation after the last frame.

If this is for a game, I highly recommend doing each animation separately and doing the looping in-engine where they can all look independently, it’ll probably save you a lot of hassle, and allow you to loop the animations in such a way that the whole screen doesn’t appear to look as obviously.

Once you have a mockup of how the elements look together like this, you don’t really need them in the same document, you can just have a still frame of the other stuff as colour/position reference (as a linked layer, so it stays the same across the different frames).

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Yeah, that’s how it will be done in-engine, of course. I just want a nice video snippet I can use for my school portfolio :slight_smile: I’m mostly working on the title screen on my free time, and making the assets separately so they can be used in-game if we choose to.

The tagging system, if I’m not mistaken, is limited to a series of frames, not a series of frames on each specific layer. I think it’s mostly a problem of having to keep track of where each specific loop starts and ends on each layer.