Custom robot and other sprites for beatem-up

[2blackbar]

Hi, im planning to do beatem-up game, im in the middle of one right now and i used my new sprite making process to create characters, here are previous ones and footage from game.





Also footage from game:
http://www.dropbox.com/s/ohmlz0osrh3j7u6/jacekpla.mp4
Here are my sprites for new game:








Thanks for watching and welcome, its my 1st post here

[Garamonde]

moving to the spriting board so you can get some feedback.

[Hiynastrike]

Its cartoony and funny... what are these exactly?

[Xeroph]

You definitely have your own style, and its a good one. Very interesting sprites.

[2blackbar]

Thanks for the move the first on the top are based on old cartoon ive seen as a kid and the last ones are my designs for new beatem-up ill make.I made first ones mostly for testing purposes if they would pass as sprite in game and IMO they work nice.
Sprites made this way arent shaded but i try to figure out ways to add some depth so they arent so flat but i also kinda like that looks as it looks a bit like cartoon animations, not sprites.

[Xeroph]

The characters hat should bend down a little more when its falling. And the falling back motion looks more like it slipped on a banana, or is that what you are getting at?

[Novally]

Nice sprites. The squirrel is hilarious!

[Thumbtacks]

Are these even sprites?

I think they look more like vectors

[2blackbar]

xeroph im adding velocity ingame so when i create animation frames then i need character to fall in exacly the same spot where he stands and then i will move character in game, i want offsets to be quite precise.
Thumbtacks these characters have skeletons and their body parts are animated, every body part can be swapped so i cn have several heads and hand types etc .
Original size is like this but once resized characters look better as sprites, eve the sizes i posted will probably be rescaled down even more to fit the resolution.

[Novally]

Are these even sprites?

I think they look more like vectors

These are sprites, BUT these are not pixel art.

[Bombshell93]

the animations are okay (they could use a little refining)
but the edges really bug me, you need to either have the line art be solid colour or have it transparency anti-alias.
I could be wrong but by the looks you've anti-aliased on a black background and then copied the sprite onto a white background, so the issue may be a little more obvious than it would be an actual use, regardless for the best of quality transparancy anti-aliasing is the way to go.

that said another issue is jaggies, it may not be directly pixel art but jaggies are still jaggies and these ones are fairly glaring and painful, I think your style especially would benefit a lot from smoother line art, I'd advice going with vector graphics to create your parts of characters, rotating pixel graphics no matter the sampling will always have a loss in quality.

[Novally]

...that said another issue is jaggies, it may not be directly pixel art but jaggies are still jaggies and these ones are fairly glaring and painful...

On a actual scenery I don't think it's a problem, but still...your point is true. Jagged edges are ugly to look at.

[2blackbar]

yea the edges are just leftovers from removed background, theyre noticeable on first sprites on top, recently i cleaned sprites more careful from backgrounds, ingame theyre not that visible on background with lots of different colours, after rescaling sprites down theres less jaggies but also loss of more and more detail, im planning to re-render the new ones anyway so i will keep an eye to keep the edges clean, i did it on dark backgrounds at first but recent tests from yesterday proved that its better to use violet/pink background , downside is that it blends a bit with outlines after rendering but its also easier to remove than dark colours, if it would be up to me i wouldnt let background to blend but thats the limitation of software.I know that using vectors would retain best quality when resizing but i wouldnt be able to do such smooth anims in software that allows using vector graphics.
On what particular sprite you see jaggies and where so i could try to get rid of it ?
Forums color profile isnt exactly sprites friendly as no game has plain white background so outlines could be really visible too much, on darker colours or at least gray its not that big of a problem.

[Bombshell93]

the squirrels shorts and gloves are the most notable jaggies to me, but the bear also has a bit of jagged look on the sole of the foot.
bar that it looks good, I like the designs, wacky, fun and colourful

[2blackbar]

So its mostly about outline edges moving too much in random directions a bit ? ITs good to ask others because sometimes working on something for hours can make you blind to some obvious problems, ill try to clean up colors a bit careful.