DDP's Sprite Workshop

[Shade]

They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. :o )

[Tacocat]

Hi there, DragonDePlatino. Apologies if this may be a little late.

   

Spoiler

   

I'm barely one year into this whole spriting thing, so apologies if I may seem a bit... new. In all senses of the word, including the fact that this is my first post here. Hooray.

(I was having fun with the snarky expression, but straight before I posted, I read that you're not looking for design ideas, just proportion and posing input. Oh well, I included it anyways.)

[DragonDePlatino]

N-n-n-no, Shade! It's just a coincidence! A Vivi-style dude is a pretty common design! Here, I'll make some edits to distinctify the character a bit more...



DANGIT.

(But in all due seriousness, I went back and fixed the square noses.)



You raised some very valid points, Tacocat! I was going for something closer to M3 than Smash in proportions, but your edits are great so I kept most of them...Snarky new face included. I wanted to avoid giving Baldy a personality because he's only going to be used for sprite testing, but I couldn't resist the quirkyness of the few face. It's here to stay.

[Plokman]

N-n-n-no, Shade! It's just a coincidence! A Vivi-style dude is a pretty common design! Here, I'll make some edits to distinctify the character a bit more...



DANGIT.

(But in all due seriousness, I went back and fixed the square noses.)



You raised some very valid points, Tacocat! I was going for something closer to M3 than Smash in proportions, but your edits are great so I kept most of them...Snarky new face included. I wanted to avoid giving Baldy a personality because he's only going to be used for sprite testing, but I couldn't resist the quirkyness of the few face. It's here to stay.

I don't get Vivi vibes from your cloaked dude Platino. Gives me more of LoZ Poe than any FF character. 
Also that style am I the only one getting Kid Nikki vibes? (most likely it is just me and my obscure senes are going off at bad time again.) 

Either way these are looking great.

[DragonDePlatino]

Remember that Mario mockup I posted a while ago? I uploaded that to my PixelJoint gallery today and realized there was a lot of room for improvement. So I spent the evening touching everything up, and here are the results:




In the new version the tiles have more contrast, the sprites have more personality, 5 less colors are used and the tile conservation is a bit more relaxed. Eight months of improvement really made a difference! I'm much more satisfied with the new style so I might add more to this mockup just for fun.

[SuperWarioWorld]

Great job!
If you care for criticism, the bricks in the background don't stand out enough; I'd pick a light color for them, but not the same color as the background. It definitely does well portraying the fact that they aren't solid, but it doesn't easily portray the fact that they're in the foreground. For example, the ground(background) in the pit seems to be in front of the background brick blocks, yet has a shadow cast over it. It looks very strange. It also looks very inconsistent, because, at some points in the scenery, these brick blocks seem to be implied to be on the same layer as the main ground(it's in front of trees, bushes and other background elements); in others, the design implies it is a background element(it appears behind floating blocks and solid ground).

Mario's right(our left) leg seems to need its "outline"(red line between his legs) moved to the right. As it is now, that leg doesn't quite look like it's the one closest to us. By the way, I would add something in that blank space in the middle of the pipe. It gives off a shape similar to a cube with diagonal edges(if that makes any sense). Koopa's shell looks strange; as if his arm is protruding from the sides of his shell and his shell actually continues on for a bit past his shoulder. This is a problem shared with both versions. The Mystery Blocks and Brick Blocks both look strange without any outline on the bottom. The bottom row of grass on the grass tile should be moved up a bit in my opinion. It looks pretty strange as is. The clouds and bushes look like orbs, though this may be(and probably is) intentional.
Also, this is just a suggestion, take this however you want: for the jump-through grass tiles, I'd slim the tile down to the top(the NES can recolor 8x8 sections of a graphic) to portray more so that the tile isn't solid on its sides.
I feel like Mario's other shoulder should be slightly showing in this screenshot; just a little bit. It may not be possible to do without making some major changes, though. Goomba's eyebrows should be thicker(if you're going for an official look; if this is stylized, disregard this). Goomba's mouth seems to continue too far to its right(our left), it throws off the angled perspective.

[kidicarus29]

Great job!
If you care for criticism, the bricks in the background don't stand out enough; I'd pick a light color for them, but not the same color as the background. It definitely does well portraying the fact that they aren't solid, but it doesn't easily portray the fact that they're in the foreground. For example, the ground(background) in the pit seems to be in front of the background brick blocks, yet has a shadow cast over it. It looks very strange. It also looks very inconsistent, because, at some points in the scenery, these brick blocks seem to be implied to be on the same layer as the main ground(it's in front of trees, bushes and other background elements); in others, the design implies it is a background element(it appears behind floating blocks and solid ground).

Mario's right(our left) leg seems to need its "outline"(red line between his legs) moved to the right. As it is now, that leg doesn't quite look like it's the one closest to us. By the way, I would add something in that blank space in the middle of the pipe. It gives off a shape similar to a cube with diagonal edges(if that makes any sense). Koopa's shell looks strange; as if his arm is protruding from the sides of his shell and his shell actually continues on for a bit past his shoulder. This is a problem shared with both versions. The Mystery Blocks and Brick Blocks both look strange without any outline on the bottom. The bottom row of grass on the grass tile should be moved up a bit in my opinion. It looks pretty strange as is. The clouds and bushes look like orbs, though this may be(and probably is) intentional.
Also, this is just a suggestion, take this however you want: for the jump-through grass tiles, I'd slim the tile down to the top(the NES can recolor 8x8 sections of a graphic) to portray more so that the tile isn't solid on its sides.
I feel like Mario's other shoulder should be slightly showing in this screenshot; just a little bit. It may not be possible to do without making some major changes, though. Goomba's eyebrows should be thicker(if you're going for an official look; if this is stylized, disregard this). Goomba's mouth seems to continue too far to its right(our left), it throws off the angled perspective.

I agree with the majority of what you said, but I do have a few comments to make.

I think the bricks are actually in the background, not the foreground. This is because the Koopa is over the bricks on the right, meaning they must be behind him. If not, he would be inside of the bricks, and I don't think that's right.

Mario's shoulder could be showing but, you're right, it would require some major changes in order to look right, I believe.

Something could be done about the shading on the pipe and the blocks such as the mystery ones, but I'm not entirely sure what.

And yeah, the Goomba's eyebrows should definitely be thicker.

[DragonDePlatino]

Thanks for the feedback, guys. I went back and made some tweaks. Here's a comparison GIF.



The background elements were a little weird. My goal was to make them monochrome blue like I've done here, but I had trouble doing that without adding another palette. After sacrificing the white of the clouds I think I've made it work.

Nice points about the sprites. I'm not sure what you mean about Mario and the Koopa's shoulders, though. The former looks OK to me and the latter should have its arms inside it's shell like this. You can edit the Mario sprite if you'd like.

I've also tweaked some of the tiles. Keep in mind, only games that used the expensive MMC5 mapper could recolor tiles on an 8x8 grid. And only a dozen games in the NES library had that chip, so I consider 16x16 attributes to be more authentic.

[SuperWarioWorld]

Wow. I really like that look for the background elements.
Ah, that's different from the current Koopa whose shoulder isn't obscured at all by his shell. I would recommend, however, placing one pixel along the bottom of the white lining on the shell to separate it - it kind of looks like it just continues to the other side of his body. As for Mario, I've attempted to edit his shoulder; what I meant was that I thought his other shoulder should show from that perspective, however, adding that would change the sprite a bit too much for such a minor detail. It looks okay if you don't outline it, but that goes against the rest of the sprite if you ask me.
Also, I had no idea about the MMC5 mapper.

I agree with the majority of what you said, but I do have a few comments to make.

I think the bricks are actually in the background, not the foreground. This is because the Koopa is over the bricks on the right, meaning they must be behind him. If not, he would be inside of the bricks, and I don't think that's right.

I know that the brick blocks are background elements. My point was that, in some places, when made to appear layered over other(colored) background elements, it could appear to be a foreground element.

[DragonDePlatino]

I'm having a blast working on this!



I expanded the level size, added more background elements, drew more enemies, made some slopes (very difficult with the 16x16 attributes) and added two smaller mockups. I also found a use for my fourth background palette and touched up everything a bit. I have some sprites and tiles not shown here while I'll likely share once they're compiled.

[Thanatos-Zero]

You did well, but one question, which palettes do you use for the sprites?

[DragonDePlatino]

Ah, yes. I almost forgot to share those. Keeping in line with NES restrictions, I used 4 different palettes with 4 colors each (including transparency). You can see them in the upper-right of this image:



If you're curious where the colors themselves come from, my palette was made using bisquit's NTSC generator with the saturation turned up to 2. The yellow from his palette is a little dirty, but the reds are actually red which is why this palette has always been a favorite of mine.



Here's another WIP for a project I've been working on lately. It's a medieval Spelunky clone with the working title "Dragorogue". Been doing lots of concept work and slowly learning C++ to see if I can bring this project to fruition. This will eventually have some GUI, treasures and a magical fountain on the right, but the basic tiles are pretty much finished.

[Ton]

They're so cute!

[TheShyGuy]

How much programming experience do you have? C++ isn't something that I'd recommend to an absolute programming beginner. Though, that's not to say you couldn't do it. Here's a list of books: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38824...e-and-list I strongly advise reading a book than surfing the internet for C++ tutorials or code samples. Right now, I'm reading C++ A Dialog by Steve Heller which seems to be pretty decent. He starts off briefly talking about the lower level side, about memory, cache, machine instructions, etc so that you have a better understanding of what occurs as a result of your code. Due to this, Heller sets the reader up such that they have a better understanding of some general programming concepts and can reason more effectively when writing efficient code.

If you don't have any prior programming experience, then I recommend using an engine like Unity while using C# for coding. Why? Because C# is a relatively easy language to pick up quickly with little headaches. With C++, there are subtleties that are easy to overlook for a programming beginner. By using Unity, you have a lot of the work already done for you which includes collision, rendering, sound, music, animation, an editor (this is a biiig plus), inspector, etc. Since it has an editor, you're also able to work with others more effectively and get to the "game" part quicker. If I were to work with someone else again, I'd choose Unity+C# over making everything from scratch or building on my prior libraries. However, even if you go with Unity+C#, you might not succeed within a year, mostly because you'd still have to learn C#, Unity's API, make the content, basic AI, and research about procedural generation. That's a lot. Not to mention, just because you've learned the syntax and semantics of a programming language doesn't mean you can now write code effectively and with ease. That takes a lot of time and continuous practice.

Anyways, good luck on your project. I don't intend to demotivate you at all. I'm just trying to help you out and point you in a better and more effective direction.

__

Note: I am biased towards C#/Unity since I've used C#/XNA for the past 5 or so years and have recently began using C#/Unity. Though, C++ is a worthwhile language if you want to invest in it.

[DragonDePlatino]

Am I an absolute programming beginner? Yes and no.

I learned basic Python programming by watching thenewboston's videos, then how to use the PyGame library using "Making Games with Python & Pygame" (A .PDF so it's technically a book?). I programmed in PyGame for a while and taught myself the basics of movement, sprite sheets and collision detection. I learned PyGame didn't support vsync, though, so I quickly abandoned that.

Recently, I decided I'd give SDL a shot. PyGame is heavily based off of SDL, so I'll already be familiar with many of the classes. All I need to do is learn C++, which has been going pretty well with thenewboston's C++ videos. And once I'm done with that, I plan to work my way through Lazy Foo's SDL tutorials then jump right into game development like I did with PyGame.

I've considered and researched Unity, but the general consensus is that it's overkill for a side-scrolling pixel art platformer...If I were making a more complex game, though, that would be my first choice.

And don't worry, the procedural generation won't be hard at all. I'm going to use a very similar system to what Spelunky did. Basically, generating a little movement path and then filling it up with pre-designed rooms. I won't have to learn about noise functions or any of that complicated nonsense.