Animation in LayeredImage freezing?

[pumpkin spike]

I set up a blinking animation with LayeredImage and noticed that as I placed dialogue in the game, the blinking animation freezes and defaults to the closed eyes image whenever I change between two mouths. This also coincides as the last frame of the animation, but I tried putting in an extra frame to see if it freezes there instead, it doesn't. What might be causing this? Has this happened to anyone else?

LayeredImage code:

Code: Select all

layeredimage a:
    always:
        "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_base_down.png"
    group eyes:
        attribute open:
            "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_openeyes.png"
        attribute close:
            "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_closedeyes.png"
        attribute blink:
            "a_down[gender]_blink"
    group mouth:
        attribute open1:
            "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_openmouth.png"
        attribute frown:
            "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_frown.png"

blinking code (I have a separate one for each gender which has identical code, just a different image name):

Code: Select all

image a_down_m_blink:
    "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_openeyes.png"
    5.0
    "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_closedeyes.png"
    0.2
    "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_openeyes.png"
    0.5
    "images/a[gender]_down/a[gender]_down_closedeyes.png"
    0.2
    repeat

script:

Code: Select all

menu:
        "Please choose a gender."
        "Male":
            $ gender = "_m"

        "Female":
            $ gender = "_f"

    scene bg with dissolve
    show a_down blink frown at Transform:
        xpos 0.0 
        ypos -250
    with dissolve
    "text"
    show a_down blink open1
    mc"text"
    show a_down blink frown

This is the point where the stopped animation occurs. At first, I didn't put the 'blink' per show of the sprite. Since I've put it there, the error occurs a little later in the script, but at a similar transition between open1 -> frown.

[pumpkin spike]

Troubleshooting I've done since:
-Added a second blinking sprite that does not need to switch between genders, this one performs with no errors. Might this have to do with the code needing to continuously check which sprite's gender I want?
-Changed a few blinks to just open, this seemed to eliminate the problem. Does this have to do with timing, too? Maybe I'm not letting the animation code run long enough to reach the error?

Maybe there's a another/better way to pick between LayeredImages that I don't know of since this isn't really working?