Unamed tSR Game Spriting Disscussion Thread

[sponge7325]

OK, since all I really have right now is some sprites for this game, I though I might as well ask for criticism on my current sprites here before I get the entire games plot down. I've also deleted the other thread until further notice.



Along with crit, some of you guys can help me sprite some characters for the game, if you want. All I really need is some random tSR members right now (And possibly some corrupted versions), so you can just sprite yourself and some other members, if you want too...

[recme]

Makes Previous ship a bit more round. And Gilberts hands are in wrong position. Other than that, nice.

[sponge7325]

Makes Previous ship a bit more round. And Gilberts hands are in wrong position. Other than that, nice.

How's this?

[recme]

Fine I guess. Also don't band on the other part of the ship. And you almost anti-aliased on everything. Take some of it off.

[sponge7325]

Fine I guess. Also don't band on the other part of the ship. And you almost anti-aliased on everything. Take some of it off.

You mean banding on the glass? I kinda meant it too look like that, so it would like transparent and glass-like. If thats not what your talking about, please explain more, i'm kinda rusty on my spriting language.

And the anti-aliasment is basically the main part of the sprite style. I believe I would like to keep it like that. However, if you think it should REALLY be changed, could you show me some examples where I should lower it down?

[StarSock64]

I know you guys are enthusiastic to make cute tsr projects and I don't wanna come off as a killjoy but...honestly

you guys are not ready.

I feel like a lot of you newer members should invest your time in pieces that will improve your abilities and understanding of art, rather than trying to produce things to be used in games. There's not necessarily a problem with trying to make a game for the sake of having a sense of direction, but I'd really rather help you guys with things that'll help you learn more. These tiny simple things show that you're lacking some skill with your pixel art, but you're not gonna get much out of trying to fix these kinds of pieces, especially if you put so much emphasis on trying to produce many pieces for the game instead of making one good piece at a time.

I can't make you stop, but...it's something to consider.

As for C+C for these pieces, the AA just makes things kind of blurry and it will not work with other non-white backgrounds, so I suggest you just get rid of it. Gilbert's body is also not at the right angle when compared to his head.

[sponge7325]

Ok then, you all asked for it...

NO MORE ANTI-ALILAS!!!



Also added a backround and made Prevoius Ship's glass blue, but i'm still kinda unhappy with it...

And Starsock, Not to negate everything you said, but there's a lot that I am going to have to sprite in this game, as long as I have all of there helpful members around me, I'll probably get better and better at spiriting over time. Who knows, I might end up as good as Gors!

Oh yeah, and I made a poem,

Once, anti-alias was my freind,
It was not a pain to leave it,
But after a time, and a long, long while,
It was a pain to hear it.

[Vipershark]

so do you actually have anything other than "i'm making a game that happens to have tsr characters and it's a platformer"

[Gwen]

You know, if makes this a gamemaker project it's really not THAT hard to manage.. Up at my university we participate in Global Game Jam, and those new to programming like me are given a real quick course on gamemaker and it's a lot easier than I thought. As long as he can get the sprites and tiles done(hell they have premade tilesets in gamemaker) this could easily become a small and quick project for him.

[Hoeloe]

As long as he can get the sprites and tiles done

That's kind of the point. Everyone here is saying (and I agree with them) that he doesn't have the skill to do this yet. He needs to practice on single pieces first, then move on to a full project when he gets better.

[Vipershark]

Apologies in advance here; this is probably gonna sound mean, but these are just my observations:

From what I can see here, there's no actual style here at all and zadaben and gors were quickly and lazily scrapped together just to say you have something on the page. While they may be only one pose, the sprites themselves don't appear to be functional for anything at all, not to mention the fact that gors looks absolutely nothing like gors outside of sharing the same colors. If you recolored those to something else, I wouldn't know they were gors or zadaben.

What I'm saying here is, just throwing pixels on a canvas isn't good enough.
While that could technically work at higher levels, the OP simply doesn't have enough of a grasp on spriting concepts to even BEGIN to handle a project like this, no matter how small.

You need to drop the whole game project idea until you actually know what you're doing.

I don't want to sound mean here, but there's seriously no other way to describe what you've done so far besides awful. That's really all there is to say about it. :/

[sponge7325]

I have no idea how me asking for crit on my sprites turened into "WTF are you doing you know you can't make games". All I ever really asked is "How can I change my sprites for the better?". I never asked "Hey guys, do you think that I should not make any games until I've gotten better at everything?".

But, that's fine. Everyone outnumbers me. I'll stop spriting for this game...

I can not believe nobody likes what I do when I try so hard

[Strasteo]

Everybody is being relatively polite here. No one is saying "you absolutely suck at spriting game creation is out of your league and always will be gtfo out of this forum"

They are merely suggesting that time would be better spent working on your spriting abilities so that your game would look more aesthetically pleasing in the end. Right now, I can tell that the sprites are lacking.

And this "I can not believe nobody likes what I do when I try so hard :C" attitude isn't helping. Hard work WILL get people to like your art more. The reason why nobody 'likes' your work right now is because you haven't gotten enough experience yet in this medium, and you need to put EVEN MORE work into it.

Instead of thinking "I'll get better eventually as I make this game" it'd be better to focus exclusively on the art and concentrating on one specific piece and making that great and learning from it as opposed to tackling a bunch of sprites without much differentiation between them and not learning from that as a result.

Granted, I went with your approach for years (working on a bunch of things and starting a bunch of projects and spriting in the same way) and it took me forever to get the fundamentals down. Yes, over the years I DID improve. But that was only because I visited places like Pixel Joint, searched for spriting tutorials, studied other expert pixel artists' pieces methods and techniques etc. that I started evolving my style and become more fluent in the art of pixel-placing.

Anyway, hope I don't sound like an elitist asshole. In the end it is your choice. But don't feel like a game project shutting down is the end of a world. I myself and probably a bunch of others here have projects that we stopped working on because the graphical style was not representative of our new abilities, which made the game world that much more believable. I wish you luck in your endeavors!

[Garamonde]

Don't give up sponge, just work on spriting for a while, and maybe someday you can come back to this. Then you'll look back and think, "wow, I sure have improved since last time... with my new and improved spriting ability, I'll make amazing sprites that everyone will love and my game will look great!" And no, nobody's saying that "you can't ever do it so give up on it forever", they are trying to help you so that you can grow, gain experience and show your full potential. Like you said yourself, you want to make sprites as nice as Gorsal's, so in order to do that you need to focus your time on improving your sprites. He didn't become a pro overnight, a few days, a few weeks, or even a few months. It took him countless hours of time, practice and persistence to get where he is now.

Just don't get discouraged, and don't ever think that we don't appreciate you trying, we are just trying to help you, because some of these guys have been in your shoes, so they know what will happen if you keep going in this direction. It won't benefit you, but following us will. We believe you can get better sponge! Just trust us!

[Jawnsunn]

Hey man, I really think if you seriously want to improve(like what the above posters have been saying) you should look at other games that are similar to your style and some other people's pixel work. Observe on how they do things and look up on other pixel techniques.

Keep working bro, I'm sure you'll get better.