Midday-Mew's Sprite Thread

[Midday-Mew]

Okay, hello everyone, Midday here. This will be the thread I will use for sprites I made. Most of what you'll see here will be customs, but edits will occasionally appear.

So, here is a sprite sheet I just finished. It has some edits, but some of the sprites are customs. The sprite sheet is meant to be in NES Mega Man style. I have included the credits to these sprites in the image itself. I hope to submit these to this website at some point for other people to use, but I wish to receive critique on these sprites first. My hope is to make these sprites good enough to use in Mega Man fan games by anyone who wished to use them. I edited/made these because frankly, I'm sick of the mugshots from the Mega Man 3 credits that everyone seems to use--they aren't in the right style and have boring poses that really only work for playable characters rather than boss mugshots, and only when put on a black background. These can work on any color background and still be in NES style. Also, the grayscale sprites are Game Boy sprites. Also included is the NES palette I was using, the same NES palette that my good friend DragonDePlatino suggested that I use. This way people can fix the colors if they wish to use a different NES palette. I did not include a Game Boy palette, simply because the Game Boy did not have more than four colors that could be used, so the palette was too simple to include in here. The only real issue I have with these sprites is Bomb Man's Game Boy styled grayscale mugshot. The colors and contrast looks a little bland, if you ask me, so if I could figure out how to rectify that I'd change it for in the future. I figure that changing the way the face is shaded (the part that is normally yellow) would fix it, but I'm not sure how to go about doing that.

Without further ado, here are the sprites:



Please critique these sprites and how they can be improved further! Thanks so much.

[DragonDePlatino]

Hmm...I can't say much since I've critiqued this to death, but why not take a fresh look on things with a new palette?



After working with the NES palette for months, this is the palette I eventually found to be the best. It's not without it's fair share of faults (no pure yellow) but it's miiiles better than other versions of the NES palette. The contrast is fantastic, there's a good spread of hues and you don't have to hue-shift to obtain nice shading.

Oh, and I also took the liberty of removing the duplicate grays from your palette and recoloring your grayscale characters to make them closer to their colored counterparts. Trust me, the former will save you a lot of headache in the long run.

And one last thing...trim that text at the bottom! All you need is "Give credit to Midday-Mew" and a personal link. Something like this.

[Vipershark]

I don't mean to be Debbie Downer or whatever, but isn't that palette a custom one that would only be usable with outside emulation tools like YY-CHR?
Unless you can change to different "versions" of the NES palette on the actual hardware it seems like that's a kind of, uh... useless, I guess, edit.

I don't really see much point in bothering to keep something NES style and in the NES palette if the "NES palette" can be arbitrarily changed like that to something that isn't even possible on the system.
If anything, I think that sort of thing would cause confusion as palettes would differ between different sheets and people would end up possibly using the wrong colors.

[DragonDePlatino]

Ah yes, let me explain that a bit...

We know that the NES palette has 64 colors (with a few duplicates) but there is no accurate representation of the NES palette on an RGB monitor. Colors on the NES were generated in the YPbPr rcolorspace, which is entirely different than RGB. It's like converting meters to hand-widths. One is rigorously defined with specific values (RGB) while the other is a bit fuzzy without specific boundaries (YPbPr).

There's also the fact that unlike RBG, YPbPr colors are different from television to television. If you tweak the knobs on your TV, you are actually changing the palette itself which can create all kinds of weirdness when you're trying to approximate it in RGB. You can read this topic from the NESdev forums if you want the nitty-gritty details. The point is, there's no single RGB NES palette that everyone can agree on.

And as for the palette I'm using, I used Bisqwit's NES palette generator with the saturation set to 2.0. Think of it like finding a nice television, then twisting the knobs until you get juuust the right color.

[Ton]

Using DDP's palette tool link seems like the way to go. I quite like the new mugshots for Time and Oil Man.
I would also suggest adding Oil Man's "classic" mugshot too, without the scarf. And with both the eastern and western palettes?
Nice work!

[Midday-Mew]

Okay, so I applied some changes to the image. Also, this sprite sheet doesn't have just edits. Oil Man's and Time Man's mugshots were sprited from scratch by me (with an edit by DragonDePlatino on Oil Man's mugshot, which I then re-edited), in that I looked at an image of Oil Man and an image of Time Man in the Mega Man Archie Comics, such that the two images from the comics were just referenced rather than traced.


In this version, the main changes are to the palette and to Bomb Man's Game-Boy-styled mugshot's shading. I went with a default NES palette this time (I think it was the default one, but I'm not sure after reading Platino's explanation above this post). Either way, I think this version actually looks better than the previous version. I like Bomb Man's Game-Boy-styled mugshot much better now.

Another change that was made was to the layout, I think I didn't make it clear enough that the grayscale sprites at the top were not NES style, but were, in fact, Game Boy style, meaning that I couldn't really use Platino's version (sorry, dude!) since the original Game Boy could not use that many different colors--it only had a palette of four colors depending on the type of screen the classic Game Boy had: one kind of screen had white, black, a lighter gray, and a darker gray; the other type of screen tinted those same four colors to be four different shades of cabbage green.

So without further ado, here is the third version of the sprite sheet:

Using DDP's palette tool link seems like the way to go. I quite like the new mugshots for Time and Oil Man.
I would also suggest adding Oil Man's "classic" mugshot too, without the scarf. And with both the eastern and western palettes?
Nice work!

Well, thank you. ^^ I could add Oil Man's "classic" mugshot (with the scarf removed) in both the western and eastern palettes, I suppose. I'll do that next in the next version. I hope to make the next version the final one.

Just a question, Ton...by "classic", do you mean the pose from Powered Up, or do you mean the same as the one I have here, just without the scarf?

[Ton]

I mean just his original look without the scarf.

[Midday-Mew]

Okay, so in this version, I added alternate mugshots for Oil Man, of his classic look (without the scarf) in both the western and eastern palettes. Is this what you meant by "classic" Oil Man, Ton?



I really could use some critique on this, especially for the new Oil Man mugshots on the right.

[Ton]

Pull the lips up a few pixels and maybe make them a bit thicker?

[Midday-Mew]

Pull the lips up a few pixels and maybe make them a bit thicker?

Do you mean like this?



To everyone: Is this better or worse? I only put the alternative Oil Man mugshots in this image because the mugshots of the other characters (and the mugshot of Archie's Oil Man) are unchanged from the previous image. Please critique this image and the previous image. Thanks. ^^

[Ton]

I think it's pretty rad. Nice work!

[Midday-Mew]

So, I submitted the sprite sheet of the Robot Master mugshots to the TSR database for review. I'm excited and nervous at the same time, considering this is the first time I've submitted a sprite sheet to TSR. If it gets accepted, I can finally close the book on this months-long project of mine. It's taken me very many months to finish it, possibly even over a year or two. I'm crossing my fingers, I hope it makes it in!

I think it's pretty rad. Nice work!

Sweet! Thanks so much! ^^ I'm glad you like it, Ton!

[Midday-Mew]

Hello folks! It's Midday again. Here's a sample of the project I'm currently working on, a rather over-ambitious spriting project where I attempt to sprite all Mario series items (barring those from the M&L games, from the handheld Mario Party games, from the Mario&Sonic crossover games, and from the sports games, as well as most of the items from SMRPG since those didn't really have a physical appearance, though I made an exception for the Max Mushroom, Royal Syrup, and Star Egg, as seen in the following sprite sheet!) in my Super Mario World Revamped style!



The Super Mario World Revamped Style is basically a revamp of Super Mario World style. The restrictions to the style are as follows: sprites generally limited to 16px by 16px tiles, up to 8 colors per 16px by 16px tile (transparency reserved for the ninth color), and using only colors naturally found in Super Mario World. Also uses shading in the sprites, and sprites in this style are intended to be a vast improvement over the horrid shading of the original SMW sprites. There were some sprites which I did not include from Super Mario World, either because I felt incapable of making an improved version (Power Balloon), or because I felt that the originals were just fine (Cape Feather, Coins, Silver Coins, Key, P-Switch, Silver P-Switch). Although I do believe I could make an improved version of the P-Switches' shading, now that I think about it... Hm....

Also, the Mega Mushroom sprites at the top are a work-in-progress and not finished. I still need to animate those in a personal animation so as to get the frames right for the sprite sheet.

Critique and feedback on the sprites would be much appreciated! If you have questions about which item is which, feel free to ask me.

As a side note, the Mushroom with the crown motif is my design of the Max Mushroom, and the jar/bottle with the gem "cork" and the crown motif is my design of the Royal Syrup. The Max Mushroom and the Royal Syrup items are from Super Mario RPG.

EDIT: I forgot to mention, but the icons used for the apples are temporary and will be replaced with better ones once I figure out which ones to use for them. By icons, I mean the "$", "G", "Y", "Bk", and the skull-and-crossbones. The icons are intended to aid colorblind users in telling the apples apart. The apples are incidentally a merge of the berries from Super Mario World with the apples from the Overthere in Super Paper Mario.

[Ton]

I really like these. Good work!

[Midday-Mew]

Attempted to do a Mewtwo head in 4-color limitation. Side note: where I'll be using this sprite will be on a black background and will not be displayed at 1x.

I think I didn't do so well.

I need to do a Mewtwo head, a Lucario head, and a Charizard head, at the smallest possible size, and in grayscale. I'm pretty nervous about having to do it because I can't sprite most Pokemon to save my life, much less at such a small size.

Please critique and please suggest how I can revise this sprite to make it look more like a Mewtwo head?