Runouw's sprites

[Runouw]

Animated. Although, it looks a little sloppy. 

[FarmerM]

His core lacks movement kinda like you animated the limbs around one static body.
Also, the shading and outlines are also a little inconsistent making it hard follow smoothly.

[Gors]

I for one like the smaller head proportion, it gives out that 'serious' game tone, much like Castlevania does; however this style is still a little cartoony because of the extra detail given on the face.

But styles aside, your sprite is still kinda messy because of the inclusion of single pixels on the shading. I will make another tutorial when I'm home to help you out.

[Runouw]

I'm back. So I'm hoping to continue my spaceship sprites and I'm trying to find a suitable background starfield and planet to use.

I did a sketch of a planet here to get an idea of what I was getting myself into:

And here I spent a few hours making it for reals:

[Gors]

i really like the colors, very vibrant

[Runouw]

I'm trying to draw a launch tower and launch clamps now. Excuse the unfinished background. Although, I really like the simple shape of the clouds for some reason.

[Runouw]

Working on some new character concepts.

[Ton]

I love the planet. It looks amazing.

The people look ALMOST great. They're just missing some readability. The little girl's face/neck and the pirate (?) girl's torso need attention the most. Proportions are just slightly off for most of them.

[Runouw]

I'm not 100% sure how to fix any of the proportions, but I tried giving her an actual waist.

[Gors]

I really like this style. Just try avoiding single pixel jut outs, even though you think you need them:



this is just a small edit (since i'm at work), I highlighted the problematic parts and tried streamlining the shading. Notice that even though I cleaned some pixels, details were not lost because when you zoom out to 1x, these small lone pixels will not add up to any detail: it'll just look some noise.

Pixels work with the cluster property - this means, a single pixel may not mean anything, but if you logically place similar colored pixels next to each other, they'll be able to render better shapes and ideas.

[Runouw]

Thanks! I suppose that adding pixels in like that is bad habit of mine.


I haven't worked those suggestions into all the characters yet, but I've started on these new characters and I edited the proportions on the swordsman.


Edit:
I need to ask everyone's preference on something.


On the left side is my brother's version of the sprites, and on the right is the simplification I made to the shading. I also adjusted the palette slightly. The issue I am encountering is that my brother believes that the edits I have made degrade from the quality rather than improve it. I believe however, that the style on the right will better suit the game. 

Here's a demonstration of the characters in a typical game scene:

[StarSock64]

I prefer the ones on the right. There are some things from the ones on the left that i think could find their way in there, but they might cause too much fuss to try to implement. The hair thingies on the left woman, for example, are probably doable, but you have to know how to improve readability, and that might not be something that you want to slow down your project right now. Plus, all of the little stray pixels and such are just going to be hard to animate.

The thing that's bothering the most with those is the shading on closer arm on the woman on the far right; it looks banded and sorta detached. There's banding on the skirt of your version of the left woman, too.

A lot of your characters seem to have a weird torso:leg ratio. Some of the...stomach...areas? look too tall for how long their legs are. I think it'd be better to play with shortening the torsos a little more than elongating the legs, so probably give that a try.

oh and that swordsman, it looks a little off-balance. Shortening the torso might help with that, but I wonder if moving the head one pixel to the right will help too?

[Shawn]

In general, especially if for game production purposes I'd recommend against really overshading small sprites. most parts of the sprite add nothing and no one cares for them and they'll only create problems when animating.



working in larger chunks of colour helps with readability and form and generally makes it much easier to animate as you dont need to worry about small useless details and the consistency of them. if anything you can add them after the bigger picture is completed as i generally believe people who do detailed idle sprites tend to be afraid to animate them effectively as the detail will not consistently remain.

[Runouw]

Thanks for the suggestions. The simplified shading is duly noted. I'll get working on that later this week. The strange torso and leg proportions I have are now hard to unsee now that you've pointed it out. 

Before reading your replies, I had finished a test idle animation, right here:
En garde!


My brother is still unsatisfied with the style having such "simple" shading, but I'm still going to try to follow your suggestions for shading. I'll try to post an update later this week.

Edit:
Something like this?

[Runouw]

I'm trying to design the main character. Can someone tell me which one of these is their favorite?