E-Man's Sprite R & D

[E-Man]

Hm, fair enough then. Allow me to comment on your points.

- Ever since you mentioned that about the body, I can defiantly see where you are going with this. Compared to the other shades, the body as the lightest. Even though I'm not a fan of making my shades too dark, making the body hades a hair bit darker wouldn't hurt.

- Good idea about the shadow. I'll see what I can do to expand it just a little.

- Basically, I want to give my Goomba a more neutral expression when it is not expressing any kind of emotion. I feel that arcing the eyebrows downward would make it look permanently angry and therefore make it hard to express anger when it needs to. As for the cross-eye thing… I… Don't know… I was told a few times before that having characters have a bit of a cross-eye going on looks awkward and not a good design choice. Considering its a Goomba, though, maybe it wouldn't be such a bad thing to give it eyes like that. I might try it.

- As for AA, I didn't think that's what you use it for. From what I've seen in the sprite dictionary, AA is used to smooth edges of pixel art and therefore prevent jaggies. For the definition you gave me, the AA I would use is transparent pixels instead f pixels of a solid color.

I hope I didn't sound too mean when I was giving my points. In fact, I actually do appreciate the critique you gave me.

[Iocus]

It's alright, I understand that you might be concerned.

-Even if you like bright colors, contrast is important to make the lighter shades stand out.

-I guess not all styles would demand the presence of that shadow, but I think it looks slightly better with it anyway.

-I see, so you intend to give it a range of emotions... I guess I can see where you're coming from. Then again... (actually, looking at this, maybe making the eyebrows thicker might help.)
And yes, generally, cross-eyes look strange, but as these pictures show:
http://www.mariowiki.com/images/8/85/Goomba-SSE.png
http://www.mariowiki.com/images/a/a8/SMB_Goomba.jpg
http://www.mariowiki.com/images/8/86/Spi...r_Door.png
http://www.mariowiki.com/images/8/88/Gol...ros._2.png

it's a common trait of the Goomba race and fits them well enough.


-About the AA...well, I suppose, in general, AA is applied to make an object seem smoother against a surface. In the case of an outline, for instance, the inner AA helps to seem rounder against its inner color.



Please take a look at this image. There are three objects that can be identified: the left curve, the oval in the middle, and the right curve. The oval shows a complete AA against the pink surface. The right curve, on the other hand, only exhibits AA on its inner surface, since it's the one that remains constant. The background, presumably, would be changing colors all the time, so it would only look right against a certain surface color. This can be seen on the left curve, where pixels of darker shades of white AA its outer surface. The curve might arguably be even smoother, but only against this surface. If used on any other surface, it might end up looking something like this: , which is not appealing.

An actual style that has used outer AA is the M&L: SS style. while it looks fine on light backgrounds, the grey pixels really stand out against darker ones.

Darn, didn't expect to give such a long-winded explanation. Hope you got something out of it though.

[E-Man]

It's been a while since I updated this thread. I spent some time stewing over what Iocus said and this is what I came up with.



Beisdes changing the color of the lower body (Is this what you had in mind, Iocus?), I also made a bigger shadow. I'm I little concerned that I made it a hair bit too big, but what do you think?

Anyway, after Iocus also told me to make the eyes cross-eyed, I went ahead and did that (looks better than I thought it would). While I was doing that, though, I also recalled what he said about making the eyebrows thicker and tried that. What I ended up with looks like a hybrid of a Mario & Luigi sprite and a Paper Mario one. I liked how it turned out, but considering that it now looks like it's merging with the outline, I went ahead and resolved that by trying to make the outline lighter. I was originally going to just increase the brightness of the color, but after looking at the mouth, I made the outline the same color as that to knock out a color. Then, I noticed how the new outline for the head is almost the same color as the outline for the body, which lead me to just make the body outline the same cold as the one for the head and zap another color off the palette.

As for the expressions below, they are there to provide an example of what I was intending for the giving the Goomba facial expressions. They need to be updated to reflect the new style change I'm making, but it shows pretty well why I'm not interested in making the Goomba permanently angry, right?

Also, Iocus, thank you for your thoughts on Anti-Aliasis. I don't mean to sound impolite, but I already knew about some of the things you covered and actually stated them earlier in the topic. I didn't mention them again because I thought I would sound annoying by being a broken record about it.

[Iocus]

Now that you've gone and done that, I have a few more suggestions, and an edit to go along with them;



I fooled around with the colors and the shading and added some unnecessary fluff, but I circled the areas which are related to the more essential changes.

- That blueish gray on the eye is actually blending with the Goomba's skin-- my edit shows a possible alternative.

- That second shade on the Goomba's head is a tad too dark, it's blending with that brown's darkest shade. It's also much too unsaturated. The same could be said about the body's second shade, but to a much less drastic degree.