The VG Resource

Well, it's been a while since I had anything to post here of substance, so here we go.

From top-left to bottom-right, we have the new Shacklebolt idle frames, Midi's new damage animation, and a test of Trey's new idle, which has a trimmed color palette, (hopefully) fixed legs, and the tiny nubs that were supposed to be his hands are now open hands.

To the right of those, we have Midi standing next to one of Sketchasaurus' Fighting Titans, with two brightness variants compared to his original NES-style turtle thing. You may also notice I added collar flaps to Midi's platform sprite, but it's difficult to see at this size anyway; it just looks better than without to me.

Next is a little sprite doodle of Midi and Shacklebolt in Super Smash Land style.

On the row beneath those, we see Pikachu. His outline has been lightened a bit, and his belly is now larger where it was requested.

Below him, my Sonic NG remastered sprite has new quills so they're not the stiff triangles they were before. Mario and Luigi's hats have the pillowshading fixed, and all the characters have had their palettes trimmed. The shading on Peach's dress was changed to look a bit poofier, like in Super Mario 2 All Stars, something I noticed was for some reason lacking in the GBA version.

Lastly, a mock-up screenshot of Trey, Shacklebolt and Midi about to fight the turtle titan... who is not Michelangelo.

Oh, and an animated version of Shack's idle. Phew, that's a lot of stuff.

Hey pretty nice! But that sky is a problem. It's super dithering.

See backgrounds shouldn't be super detailed or else it makes it harder to see the characters and objects in the foreground.

Ahaha, nice! I can imagine Kamekannon behaving like Bowser during his boss battle in SMB3 like that.
I like how you've interpreted the NES sprite, it's also cool how massive you've made 'im, too! I'm interested to see how you interpret and animate these fellas.
Here's a bit of artwork for additional references.
I also agree with Koopaul, the details of the backgrounds kind of interfere with the readability of the character sprites. I would consider maybe using flat colors or 2-shades for backgrounds. and a little bit more of a light blue tint to the far trees will also give it a more roomy/atmospheric feel and really add depth to the 2D world.

Thanks for the advice and the ref pics. I hated how the cannons came out when I did them, so now I can fix those. And yeah, I figured since they're called Fighting Titans, they should be massive, and even your game mockups gaveme the impression that they'd be around 9-12 feet tall, except for the boss lizard, who I plan to make even larger!

Phew, those Michelin-man arms are gonna be the death of me when it comes time to animate. I hope this looks better.

Animating things like that can be a nightmare. I've attempted before. I'm sure people will be happy to help you along the way.

please try putting all your sprites in the first post.
also great sprites bro!
hey is this a game project?

The sprites do look really good. They look really impressive. Good luck with the animation poses. I've seen some people take one pose, move certain parts around, and fill the empty spaces.

I do something like that; I build a bunch of body parts and then assemble them into each new frame. Then I just draw new parts when I need them. The thing here is this guy is huge, and his whole body is going to need to move. I stand corrected, the arms aren't going to be the hard part; it's the shell.

OK, so first, I added some new expressions to Midi's list, and moved his ears down on some, because ears are good for conveying emotion in an anthro (the face on the right is soooo cute). Next up is Sophie, who's one of Midi's supporting characters, and Shacklebolt, who's line art sucks because I drew him myself and still have to clean up his lines in some places. :/

Below, I fixed the pengrunt's walk cycle so he doesn't have that awkward forward bob anymore, and tried making a new enemy which I'm just calling an autoball for now. It drops from a vent and unfolds itself, sort of like the centurion sphere and a sentry turret mixed together. It can walk like a spider and be picked up after being defeated, provided the damage that shut it off was not a fire attack. I may come up with some puzzle mechanics regarding them.

Lastly, I tried blue-shifting the trees as they go further back. It sort of makes them look like they're blending into the sky color, which looks more realistic to me after looking at some mountain ranges; things tend to turn blue as they get further unless there's a fog to change the color.

Also, two different grass styles. Lemme know what you guys think is the better one.

The ears look like they shrink when they change "expressions."

@Trollerskates,
I was trying to make it look like they were pointing towards the back of the head instead of just going down. Foreshortening is hard with pixels. Thanks for pointing it out.

@awesome jitter,
Normally, new sprites are put in the last post so people don't have to jump back and forth to discuss them. I used to put them all in the first post before I was told not to.

And, yes, this is a game project. There's a thread for it in the Games Development board.

OK, how're the ears now?

Also, in regards to the trees, I've decided that I'm going to do them in three parts and use parallax scrolling with them. Even though the trees do not all appear on the same elevation, which would make parallax problematic under normal means (the way Game Maker tiles backgrounds, for instance), my fix is this: make them an actor instead of a tile. The tree block will check its position against the camera and offset the layers accordingly, so the scrolling can be achieved while still being able to break the tree-filled area at any point, and even overlap them, for instance, on hills and such. I'll post the tree layers once I've completed them, but I'm going to redo the foreground trees as well, since I think they look like crap.

Got bored last night and drew a quick Chell. I wanted to do her with a full jumpsuit, but it's not very readable at that resolution, so I went with the tanktop instead. I realize the face looks a bit odd, but every other variation I tried either gave her a long nose or a huge chin, and Chell is supposed to have a sort of small face, so I went with the best thing I could come up with. This size is closer to what the SNES versions of Metroid and Castlevania use, but I used the cartoonish head so she could have a face at all.

midi youre a very talented fellow, but i do understand how its how its hard to take crits sometime; youre looking at the biggest pansy when it comes to c+c. i think you have a lot of potential and hope you continue spriting.