Midday-Mew's Sprite Thread

[Midday-Mew]

Hello everyone, Midday here. I'll be using this thread to post some of my sprites for a Megaman fan game I've been working on. The Megaman fan game in question is one of my personal projects.

That said, here is a sneak peak at a tileset I'm working on for an ice level. The frozen food items in the tileset are going to eventually be incorporated as tiles, for they'll be frozen inside the blocks of ice. I guess you could say I was inspired by Wario Land I and II for this tileset. ^^;

You can see the tileset inside these spoiler tags, since I'm not sure whether the image is too large. Note that the tileset is a work in progress (WIP):



Also, here are some of the sprites for Bisect Man, one of the Robot Masters (ignore the mushroom dude's sprites in the image):



The following image that is in spoiler tags is a Lego level tileset (for the aforementioned Megaman fan game), but note that this one is just the bare bones of the tileset and is also a WIP, for I need to work on some background tiles and some Yoku Block tiles. Also, I need to recolor the tiles to be more colorful, the grays won't work for what I want to use the tiles for. I'll try to figure out a palette that only uses five colors including white and black (not including transparency in that number count). There's a chance I might remove white as a color, or perhaps I'll have to do a few adjustments with fixing the palette to not use so many colors. I have an idea of what to do next to reduce the color count.

I think I was unintentionally inspired by that boss level in the Mario Zone of Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. It was a long time since I've played the game, but I must have some how used the same idea for this tileset without even realizing it. I only realized it recently when I went back to replay Super Mario Land 2, a few months after having stopped working with this tileset.

But for now, here is the work-in-progress Lego level tileset:



Please note that I'm a novice spriter. ^^; I'm not very good at this, I think. So uh...I guess I tried my best. ^^;

Any feedback would be much appreciated. ^^ I have plenty of room for improvement, after all. Feedback really helps me improve my work.

Thank you for your time, for your patience, for any feedback you may provide, and for reading this. ^^

EDIT: Needed to replace a broken link. Sorry! For those who are wondering, the link that broke was the one for the ice level tileset.

[deathbyjaguar]

The black shadowing of Bisect's shoulder gives an unnecessary curve to his face, giving him a sort of chubby appearance. I think that adding some more black pixels to the left of that shadow should easily fix that up.
You might also want to consider adding some blue to the feet. I see what you're trying to do with the whole "bisect" thing by using black and white, but the feet look kind of bland. Adding a streak or two of blue should solve that.
And last of all, if you want to emphasize the black/white difference, try switching the black and white on the torso. It makes the black and white look more like a design than a contrasting shadow.

As for the Lego Blocks, they may be more apparent as Legos if you add transparent pixels between the top "nubs". To further establish that they are Legos, you could also increase the size of the individual bricks, but that part is just an idea.

[Midday-Mew]

Hello everyone. I have worked on several sprite sheets since my last post, but most of it is stuff I have posted on other websites.

However, I do have a sprite sheet that I plan to submit, but I'd at least like to get some criticism on it first before I do.

You can see it here:

[Lexou Duck]

well aint that funny i did that too a long time ago


as you can see i used the colors of the NES palette, which you didn't for some reason
i'd also like to tell that every 16x16 tile is limited to 4 colors only

[Kelvin]

I love the comic version of Oilman. He looks so cool with that scarf around his face. You did a good job capturing the look, though I think you should try with the NES palette and see how it turns out.

[Midday-Mew]

well aint that funny i did that too a long time ago


as you can see i used the colors of the NES palette, which you didn't for some reason
i'd also like to tell that every 16x16 tile is limited to 4 colors only

They were done in Mega Man 9 style, actually. I knew I should have specified that... The grayscale ones were intended as a Game Boy variant, but some of them I'm not too happy with how they turned out. Mega Man 9 style has shading, compared to how yours looks. I'm pretty sure that the mugshots were treated differently from the rest of the sprites, correct me if I'm wrong...I know that in the NES style that most sprites followed a 4-color scheme (sometimes just 5 colors), but I'm pretty sure that wasn't the case for the mugshots themselves (I counted the colors in the MM9 official mugshots, they were around eight or nine colors apiece). Unless the NES style and MM9 style aren't the same style?

The Game Boy grayscale ones are four colors each total, however.

What is the NES palette exactly? Sorry if I'm not familiar with the concept. ^^;

Is there anything else that needed work besides the NES palette? I couldn't figure out how to find specifically colors exclusive to those found on the NES, so I sort of looked for ripped sprites with the colors I needed and used those colors. Some of the colors I used came from sprites from Mega Man 9 or Mega Man 10...

[Kelvin]

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hac...ES_Palette

Not exactly a well-thought-out palette, but if you wanna do truly NES-style sprites, there ya go. Also, NES sprites only have 3 colors, with the 4th being used for transparency. If you use 4, then the image would have to be rectangular to comply to NES limitations.

Also, any chance you could nix the spoiler tags? These sheets really aren't big enough to warrant them, and if the sheet is too wide, the site scales it down anyway.

[Midday-Mew]

http://www.thealmightyguru.com/Games/Hac...ES_Palette

Not exactly a well-thought-out palette, but if you wanna do truly NES-style sprites, there ya go. Also, NES sprites only have 3 colors, with the 4th being used for transparency. If you use 4, then the image would have to be rectangular to comply to NES limitations.

Also, any chance you could nix the spoiler tags? These sheets really aren't big enough to warrant them, and if the sheet is too wide, the site scales it down anyway.

Bubble Man's mugshot doesn't seem to follow that rule. One of the eight-by-eight squares uses five colors (black, white, light green, green, and orange). Still, couldn't they just overlay sprites with another layer, for example, in Bubble Man's case, layer one having black, white, light green, green; and layer two having orange and transparency? I understand why they couldn't do that with moving sprites (too many colors maybe leads to sudden "slowdown" when too many things are onscreen?). Question, what size are the sprites divided up into to determine which colors they can use? Like, when using mini-tiles or just tiles?

EDIT: Also, I edited my posts and removed the spoiler tags.

[DragonDePlatino]

Hey, Midday-Mew! Great to see you getting out and showing your art off! It makes things a lot easier when you can get tons of different opinions on the best way to draw something out.

As for your last post's question, you have a limit of 4 colors for each 8x8 space, but most NES (and GBC) games layered multiple sprites over each other in order to simulate more colors. Here is a good example of what I'm talking about: http://www.spriters-resource.com/game_bo...eet/41759/

So in short, feel free to go nuts but only use an absolute maximum of 8 colors for each 8x8 area or it won't look 8-bit anymore. And if you want to go into the dirty details, check out this guide over at the WayOfThePixel forums: http://wayofthepixel.net/index.php?topic...#msg115062

Also, I'd like to plug my favorite NES palette in here...I live and breathe this NES palette, use it in my emulator, and do all of my NES work in it. I've used dozens of NES palettes but I never managed to find one with a good balance of contrast and saturation until I used YY-CHR (an NES tile program) and discovered this beautiful palette:



If you'd like to see it in action, go ahead and check out my Koten v1.0 screenshots over on PureZC: http://www.purezc.net/index.php?page=tilesets&id=87