DDP's Sprite Workshop

[Koh]

I think it could do with two more frames. The animations can be much smoother than that with sprites that size. Also, the pupil looks too wide for his face.

[DragonDePlatino]

D'awww! I was really attached to my little animation but I suppose you're right. I scrapped it and went with a 6-frame animation:



On the other hand, I really think the larger pupils work better. The sprites originally had 1-wide pupils but that gave them the same derpy look as the Terraria: Otherworld sprite, so I opped to not do that. Not to mention, you can customize your pupil color in Terraria and it always felt a little pointless to me because your eyes were so small.

[Joxon]

I think the back arm should reach out front more.

[Kelvin]

His hair looks too angular. It reminds me of games that try to make things look "virtual" by making them out of big polygons. Can't really comment on the shirt, since the original sprite is too small to even tell what it's supposed to be. The arms seem to change length and thickness between standing and walking.

[DragonDePlatino]

Hey, thanks a lot! Your feedback is much appreciated. I went ahead and changed the hair, tweaked the arm and slightly improved the leg posing.



I know it feels like nit-picking at this point, but it's really important I get this base right because if I draw a few pieces of armor and decide I don't like the base, I'll have to redo a lot of work.

EDIT:

Oops! I must have left the clothing layer off when I exported the walking animation.

[Koh]

How about some hair bounciness? Also, I agree his back arm doesn't look like it comes forward enough according to the angle.

[DragonDePlatino]

It's funny you'd mention that, because I attempted to give the hair some subpixel bounciness for this newest version. But I didn't like how exaggerated the results looked, so I decided to stick with the static hair. As for the back arms, I've already pushed them forwards a few more pixels since the last version. Any further and it'll look weird with the 3/4 torso perspective.

[Joxon]

But right now it looks weird anyway. It looks like his front arm is straight, and the back arm has the elbow pointed out the way it stops so abruptly.

[Kelvin]

I think I see what Joxon means. You can barely see the back arm except for when it pops up ahead. Either the elbow is permanently bent back, or the shoulder is shifted back.

[DragonDePlatino]

I played around with the arm's perspective a bit and I'm absolutely positive it's supposed to look like that.

To animate this character, I drew a torso on the middle layer and a single arm/leg in the front layer. To get the arm and leg in the back layer, I copied the front limbs to the back layer and shifted them right several pixels. Since this is a 3/4 perspective, the leg is shifted right 3 pixels and the arm is shifted right 6 pixels. If I shift the arm to the right any farther, it will go outside of the body's border and look completely wrong. Here is the ASEprite file if you would like to try yourself.

[Joxon]

Well, actually, Terraria characters walk more like this:

With their elbows pointed back-down, so if your going for how things are supposed to look, you'll need to redraw the front arm.

[DragonDePlatino]

I'm not going for something entirely like the original Terraria. I want something heavily inspired by it (sideview head, no mouth, 3/4 perspective body) but more professional-looking. I mean, let's not all forget that Terraria's sprites are essentially heavily-edited Final Fantasy V sprites.

[Joxon]

Well, you need to fix the back arm one way or another, wether it's altering the front so it matches, or something else, because right now it looks weird. And the thing is, if this is a 3/4 front right view, the back arm should stick out farther, and you should be able to see the whole arm at some frame.

[Xander]

Really excellent work you have here! I love how you can adopt styles and really make everything match.

Kudos!

[DragonDePlatino]

Since I don't have any major projects going on right now, I'll be randomly experimenting with different things until something sticks. And I've been playing a lot of Pixel Dungeon lately (an excellent Android game), so I decided I'd tackle a redesign of it in 24x24. The game (pictured here) is really awesome but the pixel art leaves a lot to be desired. So for my redesign, I decided to push myself a bit and go for a low-contrast, realistic look like in the Pokemon Mystery Dungeon series.



It's amazing how I obsessively played this game as a child, and years later I've become confident enough to replicate the style. There are 12 colors here.