Doing Sonic 1-sized, Sonic 1-visual-styled sheets for other characters than Sonic

[The KKM]

So.

I've recently compiled a huge sheet with all the Sonic animations I'd like to see done in Sonic CD style, to organize myself.

It's about 1500 sprites and a massive beast, and still has animations missing I didn't include right now:

HAHA I'M ONLY GETTING THIS FINISHED IN 2020

So I got thinking, and decided to first, or for the variety of it, work on Sonic 1-sized sheets first, for other characters.

The objective for each one here is to make enough sprites that someone'd be able to make a Sonic 1 hack.

So far I've started Knuckles...



and Shadow...



Plans afterwards are for Blaze...


(test from a while back)

and Gemerl...


(shading figured out after the attempt I last posted here).

If it'll interest you to see, these are the sprites I'm using as reference, or in the case of Knuckles, editing from (as for stylistic purposes I'm having him be mostly a reshaded Chaotix sprite- Shadow is where I'm focusing on making all-new poses and all since I want to distinguish him from Sonic).

Spoiler

I've left figuring out what exactly they'll do in the end of game cutscene to the end, together with the continue chibis. And yes, I do intend to have them jump towards the screen.

Anyways, yeah. Who knows, maybe soon enough I'll be happily seeing these in a bunch of Sonic 1 hacks.

Old version of the post:

Spoiler

I like Sonic fangames.

I'm always sad though that they mostly go with Sonic Advance or Sonic 3 stuff since there's more availability, since I visually prefer Sonic 1 and CD.

So sometimes I start spriting out of nostalgia. These are never intended to be fully sheeted, at most an animation or two, but I do always hold the hope if I perfect them enough someone else will do the sheeting work. This also means I often do heavy edits instead of just scratch from nothing- if by reshading and resizing and cleaning something I'll have a good-looking result faster, I'll go with it.

So any crit is both needed and wanted, please.

In this specific case, I tried doing the Sonic Advance 1 and Sonic Advance 3 Eggmobiles in a style that'd fit Sonic 1. I'm relatively happy with the SA1 one- could use some fidgeting so it looks more like it in terms of proportions rather than a reskinned Sonic 1 one, and correcting some perspective and shading. The Sonic Advance 3 one doesnt look as good- I'll need a fresh pair of eyes looking at it, both mine and others ideally, but right now I can at least say it looks too rounded and not quite at the same perspective as the Sonic 1 one.



Adding to all that, a few weeks ago I tried doing some Advance poses to Sonic, plus editing Knuckles Chaotix' Knuckles to fit the Sonic 1 and CD language, and this is how it looked before I dropped it temporarily to go work on my Alex Kidd stuff.



In this case, I should add- the pallettes aren't final, as I'm yet to find something that'll fit Knuckles. His head also needs some touching in terms of the shading.

Otherwise, yeah, this is what I have now. Not going to make a project out of it, but it's something I often return to, so I'll probably be back to at least add more characters.

Wait, speaking of, I got this WIP too

EDIT: oh, forgot to mention, this is the process I'm using to do the poses that come from other games and such



Resize sprites to 4 times the size, use as reference for pose and proportions, resize to 4 times smaller, clean up.

And yeah, these are still needing a lot of polish, I'm hoping to get some help once they're done.

[Ton]

Really, really digging these. We don't have too many people who specialize in Sonic stuff here. Awesome job so far. I'd love to see more.

[MotorRoach]

Awesome S1 styled stuff. Kind of makes me want to sprite more Sonic related things, as it's been a really long while I've done those.

[DoctorGrey]

Try bumping the air intake on the underneath of the SA3 Eggmobile a few more pixels to the right (and darken the top vents appropriately). It also visually feels off because it seems that the stuff that comes up around the pilot area comes up too high, making the angles of the paneling wrong compared with the original. Removing the dithering on the vertical tailfins might help the appearance aswell.

[The KKM]

Did some tinkering- improvement?



EDIT: also animated that Knuckles Advance idle



Needs tinkering on the dreads

[Ton]

Definitely coming along well! These are awesome!

[The KKM]

BUMP



Did a first pass at G-Merl from Sonic Advance 3. Reminds me of my days doing fancharacter sprites, in the negative sense- trying to apply the shading logic of the badniks into a smaller body resulted in a lot of pillow shading, etc.

I'll have to do next pass basing myself more on Metal Sonic, who«'s more comparable.

That said, I like the construction of the sprite, my problems are more shading.

The character, incidentally-

[Ton]

I feel like if G-mel appeared in the classic series he'd be Silver or Mecha Sonic sized. Pretty awesome base though. I like your stuff. It's very consistent.

[The KKM]

So.

I've recently compiled a huge sheet with all the Sonic animations I'd like to see done in Sonic CD style, to organize myself.

It's about 1500 sprites and a massive beast, and still has animations missing I didn't include right now:

HAHA I'M ONLY GETTING THIS FINISHED IN 2020

So I got thinking, and decided to first, or for the variety of it, work on Sonic 1-sized sheets first, for other characters.

The objective for each one here is to make enough sprites that someone'd be able to make a Sonic 1 hack.

So far I've started Knuckles...



and Shadow...



Plans afterwards are for Blaze...


(test from a while back)

and Gemerl...


(shading figured out after the attempt I last posted here).

If it'll interest you to see, these are the sprites I'm using as reference, or in the case of Knuckles, editing from (as for stylistic purposes I'm having him be mostly a reshaded Chaotix sprite- Shadow is where I'm focusing on making all-new poses and all since I want to distinguish him from Sonic).

Spoiler

I've left figuring out what exactly they'll do in the end of game cutscene to the end, together with the continue chibis. And yes, I do intend to have them jump towards the screen.

Anyways, yeah. Who knows, maybe soon enough I'll be happily seeing these in a bunch of Sonic 1 hacks.

EDIT: oh, forgot to mention, this is the process I'm using to do the poses that come from other games and such



Resize sprites to 4 times the size, use as reference for pose and proportions, resize to 4 times smaller, clean up.

And yeah, these are still needing a lot of polish, I'm hoping to get some help once they're done.

[Ton]

Whooooooa. That Knuckles and Shadow are fantastic. The badnik is also kind of adorable. These are really solid!

[Vipershark]

Why is Knuckles a Chaotix re-shade? He's pretty obviously a different sprite style and if your objective is to get a bunch of different characters in the CD style, that seems to go completely against that.

It seems like it'd make a lot more sense to make minor edits to S3 or S2K Knuckles since the styles between CD and 3 are a lot more similar than CD and Chaotix.

[Ton]

It's not just a reshade. It's an edit. Check the crouch, for example. And aren't Sonic 1 and Sonic CD the same sprite style?

[The KKM]

@Vipershark:
Much the opposite. Sonic and Tails in Chaotix (or Crackers, rather), plus Mighty (who's edited from Sonic) show that Sonic, were he in Chaotix, would be a heavily shaded version of the Sonic 2 sprite, which is just a slight reshade from the Sonic 1 sprite. With that in mind, I find the sprite generally feels much closer to Sonic 1 than a hypothetical reshade of the Sonic 3 sprite. The proportions, slightly too wonky to work in the animations with big hands and shoes, the 6-frame animations, etc. So I just reverse engineer it- if Sonic in Chaotix is a heavily shaded Sonic 1 sprite, then Knuckles in Sonic 1 ought to be a heavily unshaded Chaotix sprite.

@Ton: The edit's more in specific poses, the main standing for an example is pretty much straight out the Chaotix sprite. Things'll always look a touch different since Chaotix sprites either have a huge ring in the way or miss an arm, though.

[Vipershark]

@Vipershark:
Much the opposite. Sonic and Tails in Chaotix (or Crackers, rather), plus Mighty (who's edited from Sonic) show that Sonic, were he in Chaotix, would be a heavily shaded version of the Sonic 2 sprite, which is just a slight reshade from the Sonic 1 sprite. With that in mind, I find the sprite generally feels much closer to Sonic 1 than a hypothetical reshade of the Sonic 3 sprite. The proportions, slightly too wonky to work in the animations with big hands and shoes, the 6-frame animations, etc. So I just reverse engineer it- if Sonic in Chaotix is a heavily shaded Sonic 1 sprite, then Knuckles in Sonic 1 ought to be a heavily unshaded Chaotix sprite.

I guess I should point out that I'm not trying to be argumentative here, I just honestly don't entirely understand your logic.
While I can see where you're coming from, that sort of thing would only make sense in a universe where Knuckles' first appearance was in Chaotix. Sonic may have been up-ported to the 32X to make a new game in a completely new style, but Chaotix came out long after Sonic 1 did. In the time period between them, Knuckles was of course introduced and had his own sprites made that already fit the Genesis Sonic style.

Granted, S3 is slightly different than S1/S2 but it's a LOT closer in style than Chaotix is, to the point where you basically only have to change a few pixels here and there and it fits natively as many people have already done. Your end goal is for people to be able to use your sprites in hacks, right? Are you taking palette into consideration? You've got three different shades on Knuckles' socks, for example, one of which has so little contrast from the other that I can't see them as two different colors when zoomed out. You can easily pull one of those shades out entirely for optimizing your palette elsewhere.

Anyway at the absolute LEAST, might I suggest switching Knuckles' shoes in his idle back to the S3K versions? The edited ones you did have the huge red area on our-left-his-right shoe and it makes them kinda look like clown shoes. Also on the point of our-right-his-left shoe it just seems to kind of end rather than round off due to the lack of outline, but the original shoes still have that intact.
DARE 2 COMPARE


Again, I don't mean to be argumentative or anything, I'm just kind of curious about why you made the choices you did for Knuckles.

[The KKM]

Oh, sorry if I sounded argumentative myself, didn't mean it like that.

I should mention the palettes are probably not final, ideally they're all 15-colours, Mega Drive accurate, but odds are between recolours and recolours some ended up getting mixed. For an example, I genuinely thought there were only two shades on Knuckles' socks, and just discovered a stray darker gray pixel on Shadow's furrow :V

I think the divergence here is in aesthetics, likely. You mention S3 is a lot closer in style than Chaotix, but I genuinely don't think so (at least for anyone that isn't Tails :V). Sonic 1, 2, and CD use the same basic sprites, but 3 changes them for much more evenly proportioned, rounder, IIRC actually made from pre-rendered models, sprites. They're shinier, the shoes are smaller, etc. Then Chaotix comes out, and at least with Mighty (and Sonic and Tails, blah blah Crackers), it's once again the Sonic 1-2-CD base sprites, just shaded differently. I consider 3 and Knuckles to be an entirely different sprite style, as mentioned again, rounder blah blah, while Chaotix I put with the other games.

Put another way, Sonic 1-2-CD-Chaotix feel to me are drawn sprites, with things like Sonic's feet and whatnot not making sense tridimentionally, while Sonic 3-Sonic and Knuckles have tridimentional sprites.

Following this, Knuckles in 3-K has all these quirks, rounded, etc, whereas in Chaotix, he looks drawn again- he's cartoonier, he moves more organically, and only the added overworked shading makes him feel like he could be pre-rendered.

Should also be mentioned, Mighty is my main indicator here, because Chaotix also has the question of its characters just generally looking weird overall, by design itself. I mean, hard to compare when previously you always had characters kinda look like Sonic, and now you get a slim crocodile and a bee :V Chaotix isn't a perfect approximation to the 1-2-CD art style, even if we ignore the shading- the badniks are too big, as is Espio for some reason. I just find it regardless to share much more of its artistic DNA with CD than Sonic 3 does, and this is where we could get into a long discussion about theories on what Sonic Team members designed what characters etc :V

Anyways as far as the shoes go, I do like the S3K ones, but I dunno. The ones I have right now look kinda weird because they were my attempt to apply the same kind of shading that CD Sonic's shoes have, might have to add a shine there instead at some point.

EDIT: Or in a simpler visual way, this is my thought process