Dumping in public

[Neslug]

I need to think of more creative thread names. The Prinny seen above doesn't animate in browsers that are called Internet Explorer or Safari as it's an animated PNG. Also in the following dump, I apologize for the massive watermarks. These were all originally posted on my deviantART account over the past year and it's the breeding ground for sprite thieves. In fact several of my watchers submit bad Mario & Luigi series edits on a weekly basis, it's kind of creepy really. After seeing what people have done with Ridge's fantastic sprites it just...*shudder*

Anyway, feel free to critique. Are the animations jerky? Is the shading horrible? A few of these sprites are a bit outdated, mainly the Tanoomba which has been fixed since, and the pipe which will be completely remade.

[Previous]

The goombas looks kinda flat.

The pipe has too much pure gradient shading for my taste

[Cobalt Blue]

i really wonder if there is no other way to shade a pipe that doesnt involve using gradients.


its like a rule set in stone that it has to be done that way.

[Baegal]

The wario land ghost looks awesome. I can't think of anything else to fix it!
The biggest thing that stood out to me are the signs with the goomba, block, etc on the top.
They have too much AA and look kind of jarring to the eyes.

[Neslug]

@Previous: I know the Goombas look kind of flat, they're (mostly) based on this completely overrated style. However the Grand Goomba does need a bit more shading at the bottom of its head, and I could also make the body/stalk a bit wider. The pipe I admit was rushed and is completely out of style anyway, I said it would be remade in the first post.

@Meta: Is this better? It's the same way of shading, I just brightened the colours and reduced the amount of them used.


@Baegal: Hmm, you may be right. Would it be better to make the sign pictures again in a more simplistic style, to better replicate a drawn-on-wood/plastic feel?

[Gaia]

The protag looks kinda crosseyed.

Other than that a what a fantastic dump.

[Goemar]

I need to think of more creative thread names. The Prinny seen above doesn't animate in browsers that are called Internet Explorer or Safari as it's an animated PNG.

Or Chrome, seriously who uses animated PNGs?

Everything looks pretty smashing to me. Minus the leaf Goomba, that looks really flat. I also have no idea what the first Monster Hunter icon is meant to be, unless it's from the 3DS one or something. The normal Goombas could be made a bit more round but you can probably get away with it because of the style.

[Neslug]

@Gaia: I still honestly can't see how he's cross-eyed, to the point of it being bothersome even. Both of his irises are fully visible so I assumed viewers would see him looking back at them, not at his nose. I'll try to make an alternate version in the future, but I don't think I can replicate the same effect I was going for without completely changing the shape of the eyes themselves. The reference I used was the official artwork, which noticeably has larger eyes than my version, this however was intended. Though, I could use to make his jawbone less wide, it makes his face look more masculine even though he's a kid.

@Goemar: The Prinny is my first animated PNG, because when I initially tried saving it as a GIF, the colours got messed up due to the GIF format's limitations. Since the only way to save the animation without quality loss was APNG, I went with it. Previously I hadn't been bothered when saving my animations as GIF since they used less shades of the same colour, so the colours were never merged into one.

Here's the current Tanoomba, I said in the first post that it was old and had been touched up since. It's as flat as the rest but the readability's important at such a small size. I might be able to shade the bottom of the head a bit but it could be difficult without adding another shade of brown due to the (relatively) high contrast in the current palette.


The first Monster Hunter icon is indeed from Monster Hunter 3G (great game by the way), it's the game's cover monster Bracchidios. And I think I'll stick to the more triangular shape of the Goombas, I think it better matches the official artwork and recent game depictions than a more rounded one.

[Goemar]

In the words of a great owl, "O RLY?"



Seriously, seems fine to me (yes that's a GIF).

After Portable 3rd being a HUGE disappointment I'm not sure I'll pick up another one.

[Previous]

I don't see why Prinny wouldn't work with PNG as I doubt there are more than 256 colors per frame. Whatever GIF animation software you use might have bad settings.
The issue with APNG is that nit is no standard. Mozilla runs APNG, but the PNG people don't want to support it officially and push their own MNG while Google wants to spread WebP and neither of them wants to accept the others.
It's a shame as it would be great to have a modern animated picture format without GIF's limitations, but I don't see any standard coming in the next years.

I think you are overdoing your AA so many parts give the impression of banding or even pillow shading.

[Hoeloe]

Totally just downloaded an addon for Chrome to let me view APNG.

Got it from here, just in case anyone was wondering.

As for these sprites, there's not much I can say that hasn't already been said. Certainly they're far above my abilities, in any case.

[Gaia]

@Gaia: I still honestly can't see how he's cross-eyed

Well, I could still be adjusting to the new art direction, but the way the size of the pupils are and how they're kinda a bit too close to the face gives the cross-eyed look. Remember that scene in spaceballs? Yeah, You should move the eyes a good two pixels from the center so it doesn't give off that impression.

[Kitsu]

On this one, I'm not sure his hand is going fast enough to warrant that kind of blur. Maybe you should speed up the blur frames there a bit.

[Neslug]

@Goemar: What did you use to make it into a GIF animation? When I originally tried to save it as a GIF in Animation Shop 3 it erased the basic blue skin colour and added dithering on the bag. I tried several times to change the settings when saving but to no avail.

@Gaia: I'll try tweaking the eyes.

@Kitsu: Well that's a very easy fix. Sped the two frames up by 3 centiseconds.

[Previous]

I don't know what Goemar used, but I personally use PGA whenever I make animations (for obvious reasons). I supose Animation Shop 3 would have some options somewhere, too, but PGA shows them on the main window right after opening the program: Color reduction and dither mode. These two options define how an image will be imported and how it's colors will be tweaked. PGA's default option (Optimal, Floyd Steinberg) tries to keep the original colors which works well as long as there is a maximum of 256 colors. As soon as you have more colors, they need to be merged.
I don't know why so many GIF animators have awkward default options.