Kopaka's Spriting Adventure!

[dante_flame]

Hey guys I don't think kopaka is actually planning on using all those colours. Colour blocking is using solid fill colours to identify chunks or shapes in a form to help identify similar objects and silhouette. Sometimes planned base colours are used and other times random colours are used just to fill the space when colour palette hasn't been thought of yet, I believe that is what has happened in this case so I for one will be reserving my comments on colour and tone until the next version of the sprite has come through and in the mean time will comment on the silhouette and the form that the different shapes take and how they play together.

[Kopaka]

Alright, Round 2. This is the redesign with proper Shading and Colour:



The same questions I asked earlier apply (except the palette, but I'll still take suggestions!), I'll put them down here since this is a new page:

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?

Looking forward to hearing your constructive criticism!

[Keiang]

The darkest shade of blue could use more contrast, as could the brightest shade of white. They kind of blend into the shades of black/white around them. I would recommend getting rid of the lightest shade of white entirely, since it seems unnecessary. The face seems kind of flat, and the eyes kind of creep me out. I'm also not sure about the nose, since the two dark lines thing always seemed to imply having a cat or dog nose, at least to me. The the third dark yellow pixel on the upper gold ring on the axe should be changed to the middle shade of yellow, because the darkest shade blends in with the brown, making it look like the ring just ends, especially at zoom x1. Also, that red axe could use more contrast.

The brown X on his chest looks like it's shaped a bit off, namely around the top of the leftmost gold area.

Overall, try to keep in mind contrast issues, namely if you can see a difference between two shades at the normal zom.

[Kitsu]

Maybe you should reduce all your shades to just 2 per color (except maybe the skin). You also have a bit of banding here and there.

[Kopaka]

Alright, I went through and tried to reduce the number of redundant shades I had in the colour palette, and tweaked some of the shading accordingly. I cleaned his face up a bit to hopefully give it more shape and also cleaned up his free arm/hand.



What do you guys think?

P.S My friend, adman32, also just opened up a thread looking for constructive critiques on his environment sprites, have a look and tell him what you think

[Kopaka]

Hey guys, got an update! I completed his Idle Animation, take a look:





Comments and criticisms welcome!

[Gors]

this looks like it came from a GBA game or something. Though, I still think you could use less colors for a sprite this small.



I removed some of the shades and reworked the sprite so it's more readable.

[Koopaul]

Oooh nice one Gors. Don't we wish we could all get that kind of touch up.

[Gors]

I couldn't explain what I did with more detail at the time due to me being at work, but I have plenty of time now.

You need to have better color choices. The number of colors you got would be fine for a big sprite, but in a small sprite, fewer colors can be used without negative impact. When choosing colors, be sure to have plenty of contrast between shades (his hair bangs are lighter in mine because I used the same light brown from his face; notice that this doesn't make the sprite bad - in fact, it makes the hair shapes sharper.
I also removed the lightest gray and replaced it with white instead. I am not fond of using gray in places that should be white, such as eyes and metallic highlights. It makes no sense considering that you aren't working with any weird palette limitation and takes out the high contrast that metal objects should have. Notice that with the inclusion of white alone, the axe looks metallic.
The yellow details had some redundant shades. If you have browns/oranges for hair/skin, use them to your advantage to shade. The red in the axe handle is pointless since the brown can do the job perfectly fine. Finally, it might be against the design but I removed the belts around his chest. It serves no purpose other than "trying to look cool"; it's not needed and it's a pain to render it correctly in a small sprite. Readability is important in sprites, so design your characters according to the sprite style's limitations. Check NES/SNES Final Fantasy games, for example. The overworld sprites are really different to their artwork counterparts due to console and size limitation. And yet, you can still recognize them. Removing some of the elements from a character in order to increase readability can help you a lot when making sprites.

[Kopaka]

Thank you very much for the insight Gors, I was actually reading about good colour palette when you had mentioned colour choice. I definitely saw the need to cut down the numbers of colours and reusing them when I can.

I have no qualms to the choices you made to the design or colours as I have experienced firsthand when incorporating your tweaks into the Idle Animation, everything was much, much easier.

Thanks again!

[Kopaka]

Hey guys, I've been working on a Running Animation for the Hero, tell me what you think!



He will be holding the axe on the other hand but I wanted to see your opinions on how the run is looking so far, here's the sprites if you want to see each individual frame



C+C?

[Thumbtacks]

It's real neat how much it improved so much from the first one.

Well he's looking a little stiff.

I'd say have his head turn towards the camera when his arm is at full swing, and also his axe-holding shoulder should rotate as to not look like its breaking.

[Goemar]

Here the head is defiantly the main issue, it looks like his body is moving around it instead of being part of it.
I'm not too sure about his arm though, his axe doesn't seem big enough for him to 'dragging' it but well, I guess I'll have a better opinion once his axe is added.

I'm really liking these though. Reminds me of a few of Capcom's older platformer arcade games.

[Kopaka]

Thanks so much for the feedback, and I'm happy you guys are liking them!

Currently tweaking the Idle Animation since looking at it after working on the Run for so long it made it look really stiff. During the process I decided to change up the design of the Axe weapon:



The current backbone story is that the Hero is up against an evil Alchemist that is combining animals together, creating monsters. The Axe will be the "Anti-Alchemist Weapon" so I figured it needed a little more "oomph" to it versus what I currently had.

What are you thoughts on it's design?

[Phantom Killah]

For the running animation, maybe try making his head sway a little bit left and right with his body.

The new axe design definitely looks more fanciful than the old one.