Kopaka's Spriting Adventure!

[Kopaka]

Hello! I am currently making a game for a company my friends and I created this year. I created a thread over HERE

I'm making this one here to post the current sprite sheet for the Hero characters as well as any enemies I flesh out (current demo enemies are very simple). I want to post my progress because I am a strong believer of posting my work and receiving all the feedback I can get from saavy pixel artists such as yourselves to become a better artist.

Below is the sprite sheet for the hero (name pending!)


The order of the sprite sheet is a little messy, but the order from top to bottom are:

- Victory
- Hurt
- Mid-Air Grappling
- Ground Grappling
- Air Slash
- Jump
- Idle
- Run
- Ground Attack: Slash 1
- Ground Attack: Slash 2

Some of the choreography I need to reconsider (such as the aerial attacks and running). But I'd really like to hear your thoughts about it. If you want to see him in action you can do so here

It's been a while since I was last on the spriting scene (back when I was in high school in Year 9, 2005) but I'll leave it with this

C + C?

[Cobalt Blue]

have you ever considered animating those frames to see if the animations are smooth?

i can already tell most of the frames are redundant, and the motion blur doesnt work. not to mention the character seems to shift the body of his legs(among other bodyparts) on each frame.

the whole things is a massive clusterfuck of poorly executed shading -almost everything suffers from pillowshading- and the character desings feels more like an edit of X/Zero from the snes.

[Kopaka]

have you ever considered animating those frames to see if the animations are smooth?

i can already tell most of the frames are redundant, and the motion blur doesnt work. not to mention the character seems to shift the body of his legs(among other bodyparts) on each frame.

the whole things is a massive clusterfuck of poorly executed shading -almost everything suffers from pillowshading- and the character desings feels more like an edit of X/Zero from the snes.

Hey Meta, I've seen these sprites in motion and they do animate smoothly (You can see them play out in the current web demo of the game, it is linked at the end of the opening post). I mentioned in my opening post that some of the choreography wasn't the best and I will be redoing some of it. Is there any tips you can provide in regards to creating good motion blur and eliminating pillow shading?

[Sevenstitch]

By your OP, can i assume that these sprites were made in 2005? To be honest, they look like it.
You seem to have skill, but lack some other important basic fundimentals.

I'm no expert either, mind you, but I think that these may help. Give this thread a look,
and experiment.

Your character would benefit from a complete overhaul. Right now, he looks like an eyeballed trace of a megaman sprite, which you yourself have said was your original
influence. I'd suggest you try out some new design ideas that don't involve the megaman style all together. I'm not sure why, but It seems that most spriters start with
megaman influences, and have difficulty breaking away. Your game could be so much cooler if your main character was your own, and not what seems to the naked eye
to be a recolor.

[SKELTON S. SKELETON]

there's not a single thing in that section that will help you besides maybe readability; i'd suggest looking around the internet for some better pixelart tutorials.
i can already tell what you're looking for is a pixelart tutorial on shading, though to be honest i'd simply suggest studying some of the better works on http;//pixeljoint.com

metaru's post is better when it ocme sto animation

[Cobalt Blue]

post animated gifs if you're going to show animations. otherwise we have no way to check if these animations are smooth or not -disregard of actually having to download your game for such thing-
also, motion blur 101.

[SKELTON S. SKELETON]

oh, heh, metaru i was looking for that but i couldn't find it!

[Vipershark]

Are these Megaman edits? They look like MMX edits.

[Kopaka]

They're not MMX edits, however the style I've always sprited in has been very influenced by it, so I can understand the gut reaction when people see this as an edit. Thanks to all the feedback thus far though, I appreciate it. I will be re-evaluating the hero design within the next few days and will be counting on your feedback when I come up with something

[Marth]

The overall design of the character is bland, crowded and try hard. Aside from all the aforementioned problems, this is really throwing me off. Look at the simplicity of the style in Meta's avatar, and tutorial. It's original, expressive and memorable. Your character on the other hand isn't. EDIT: Oh and it's EASY to read.

[Cobalt Blue]

its the legs. they're basically X's boots and they instantly make your character look like an edit, disregard if its "inspired" or not.

[Kopaka]

Hello!

I took the day out yesterday to consider the feedback everyone's given me thus far, and have tried to come up with a new design for the Hero of Grapple Knight. I've gotten a general design down without use of reference of any style in particular and am currently up to choosing the colour palette and shading. This is what I have so far:



At least, I think I'm not blatantly copying anything in particular, this general style came to me as I drew it, but please let me know otherwise.

What do you guys think of the design/silhouette versus the old design?

Anything you can't read well?

Any problems you guys can already see in terms of animating this?

What colour palette suggestions you guys might have?

Look forward to hearing your constructive criticisms!

EDIT: I cleaned up some of the pixels, gave him proper sideburns/ear and face, did some general shifting to keep proportions, and shifted the angle the axe sits at.



C+C?

[Keiang]

Haven't really tried giving advice before, but I guess I should start somewhere.

I don't understand the hair shading. I mean, the lightsource is obviously overhead, but the shape of the lightest shade implies he has some kind of weird mohawk thing. The eyes look kinda dead/possessed to me, but that might just be because there isn't like a pixel of white to show it's actually reflecting light and such. Also the side of his head looks kinda weird, like he has no sideburns or ear. If you're going for his ears being behind his hair, like in the first sprite, it might be good to have the hair go down a bit further on the side.

The chest seems very square, which will probably be fixed with shading, but it's kind of exacerbated by that brown under the yellow. His posture makes him look slightly hunched over, but the bottom of his armor is still perfectly flat? The sash might be an issue if you can't keep the dark gray shading of the sprite and the light gray of the armor separated, but that isn't that big a deal. I don't really get that one pixel of yellow next to the sash thing though. it seems to imply there that the yellow continues from the last area to that point, which doesn't make any sense in the context of armor. Unless that's stomach armor, in which case his stomach would be twisted. Or the armor's asymmetrical in a weird place. I dunno, it'd be nice to see the armor design without the sash thing so I can tell what's going on under there.

The shoulder pads look kinda boring, but that's probably because they haven't been shaded yet. It's a nice shape though. Since the biceps aren't really a focus in this style, I would change them to the darker shade of gray so they aren't as big a focus to the eye. I don't understand why the forearms are green, but I guess that could be nice in differentiating them from the body when they're in front of it. Also, the forearm holding the axe looks noticeably smaller than the free one. The hands need a bit of work. The one that's holding the axe looks like it's bent at a really weird angle, and the one has some awkwardly defined fingers. I think both hands could greatly benefit from having a transition color.

Speaking of the axe, the way the handle sort of shifts over a pixel once it leaves his hand looks kind unprofessional. The thing on the back end of it might be a bit too big or too curved as well, it looks less like it's a cool ornamental thing and more like he would stab his hand on it if he was holding that axe more normally. The palette of the axe could potentially blend it in with the forearms, since they use similar shades of green, and the gold (?) on the axe blade blends in with the darkest skin tone.

As for the legs, they look kinda small in comparison to the rest of his frame. I mean, I know he's doing kind of a He-Man squat thing, but his hands still get really close to his knees, even though his arms are bent like 90 degrees. The yellow knees look alright, but the one on his bent leg might need to be adjusted a bit, since it looks more like it's right above his knee, rather than on it. His shins look in scale with the forearm holding the axe, but smaller than they should be compared to the free one, due to the aforementioned size difference. Also I don't know what's with that white line on his crotch. Is that supposed to be a zipper or something?

His pose is a lot more dynamic than the old one though, even if it needs to be touched up a bit, so that's definitely an improvement. I think it has potential, and should look a lot better once you finish shading it.

Take everything I say with like, a billion grains of salt though. I'm probably just talking out my ass.

[Kopaka]

Hey Keiang, the colours on the sprite aren't final (and by final I mean, nothing like that at all, I'm not going to have 20 different colours planned lol) they're just solid blocks of colour so I can see the shapes they take, so if the colour choices seem really odd, I apologise

I'll definitely have a look at his proportions when I get the chance, thanks for the feedback! I don't think I'll need to take it with salt, or at least that much, haha

[SKELTON S. SKELETON]

you have two many colors planned, i can already tell that much. scale it back a bit