The VG Resource

Hello everyone,

I'm Jackk, 24, motiondesigner for 4 years now, just starting to be interested in pixel art and spriting, I'm currently developing a game with a couple of friends and I'm in charge of the graphics, I'm looking for advices from you guys I hope you'll like the mood of this game


Update 26th Nov








Update 24th Nov

Following the different advices, i trid to remaster the previous tree







Zoom




Update 23rd Nov

New tree, Main pic progressing.

















Update 22nd Nov


Creation of the shooter



Step 1 : First attempt, weapon rejected
Step 2 : New weapon - Shuriken
Steps 3-4 : Remodeling
Step 5 : Projectile creation


Tree update







21st Nov

Fighter actual version

100% 200%

Evolutions and integration



One of the trees

V1 V2



Couple of roughly animated gifs based on first version of the fighter





Building researches


Silhouettes


quick colors

Détails of the cut tree



Work in progress





Hope this is not completely off topic since there is a couple of sets in this post.

(images not free of right)

Bye !

Your colors look really awesome dude! I especially like how you did the grass!

Your building sprites look pretty noisy though. Try cleaning them up some more.

(11-21-2012, 11:04 PM)Mag Wrote: [ -> ]Your building sprites look pretty noisy though. Try cleaning them up some more.

You're right i figured it too, will try some corrections ! thanks.

this here

Don't use pixels of different sizes. It makes the sprite ugly and unfitting.

Wow these look amazing!! good work MrJack! And they are soooo cute!

Right about the animations these were just tests, I will rewrok them completely, but I get your comment, I posted couple of updates about tree and new character. Thanks

I see you have some knowledge in art too, but not pixelart in particular (assumed this after what you said in your post). Your colors are good and you have an idea of how shading works. But you need to work on pixel placement.

Pixelart is a kind of art where every pixel is important. So mind your pixel clusters. Scribbling over the objects with the pencil tool isn't the best way to do so because it leaves a lot of stray pixels and gives everything a gritty texture with blotty shapes. Check games with similar backgrounds (if I'm not mistaken, Tales of Phantasia could be a great inspiration for backgrounds and trees). Don't be afraid of looking at official games!

(11-22-2012, 01:19 PM)Tae Kwon Doug Wrote: [ -> ]I see you have some knowledge in art too, but not pixelart in particular (assumed this after what you said in your post). Your colors are good and you have an idea of how shading works. But you need to work on pixel placement.

Pixelart is a kind of art where every pixel is important. So mind your pixel clusters. Scribbling over the objects with the pencil tool isn't the best way to do so because it leaves a lot of stray pixels and gives everything a gritty texture with blotty shapes. Check games with similar backgrounds (if I'm not mistaken, Tales of Phantasia could be a great inspiration for backgrounds and trees). Don't be afraid of looking at official games!

Hey thanks for the advice, I already have a couple of ref i old shcool rpg, like tales of phantasia. I do understand the pixel cluster thing, but would you mind give me an exemple of what's is wrong on one of my works about pixel clusters ? Thanks in advance

EDIT: I updated the main picture, I hope i got right what you meant, please give me feedback

i'm worried about these stumps wearing such a strong and intense shadow on their backs when nothing else has it.

(11-23-2012, 06:48 PM)Cobalt Blue Wrote: [ -> ]i'm worried about these stumps wearing such a strong and intense shadow on their backs when nothing else has it.

You might be right, tell me what you think about this, I tried a complete image with the stumps in it.

err

Am I the only one that thinks that these (the enviroments in particular) are really blurry?
Like, I look at this art and it makes it feel like someone smeared vaseline on my screen.

Even zooming in to a point where I can pick out individual pixels, the graphics just don't look sharp to me at all.

It's like these were made with photoshop filters or with a digital paintbrush type thing as opposed to something with pixel-level control.

its because they're not hand made. you realise they were made with brushes when the stump alone has over 341 colors.

the whole thing is fucked up and made up to look like pixel art, but in the detail they're just a bunch of noise and gradients glued together.

Apparently you used some filter to make the pixels blurry, and therefore it isn't pixelart anymore. Don't resize your works, use fewer colors, etc. Pixelart isn't like digital work where you mix colors and brushes. Make yourself a limited palette with a fixed number of colors, and work from there.

What everyone's saying is right, you've been using brush tools and turned this from pixel art into a mixture of pixel art and a digital painting. It looks really nice (In fact, that might have been how Battle for Wesnoth did their background assets), but you could have easily done the same in pixel art if you applied some careful anti-aliasing and color selection.

Reduce color count on your tiles and assets to around 16 colors, and you should have a good balance of smooth colors and the awesome contrast and sharpness that pixel art is capable of. ;D

What software are you using for this? Because if you want to work within the limitation of the Hardware of the SNES/Megadrive I sugess that you use Graphic gale for this one. There you can experiment with the palette to see which one is right for the prop, characters, and other art assets of the game. Plus the full version only cost $20, which is cheap compare to widely used softwares such as Photoshop.