Donkey Kong Country custom/edited sprites

[Phyreburnz]

Hello everybody. I've got a ton of custom DKC sprites that I've been working on since 2011.

Anyway, I'd posted here before, but I feel like now they're ready to be added, potentially. I've not really messed with them for a while, and I'm still happy with them, so I think they are "finished" for now. I do realize that my edits are not perfect. This is an incredibly tough thing to do. Basically, I take bits and pieces of existing sprites and combine them together and fit them together as best I can to make them into a new sprite. I do that over and over to create the whole animation. From there, I tweak it until I feel like it's as good as it's going to get. I am not creating anything from scratch with these, they are all made from pre-existing sprites. With Kiddy Kong being the one with the fewest number of sprites, his edits are the most difficult. Please try to take into consideration the fact that these take me hours to do a single animation. Again, I realize they aren't perfect, but it's what I can make given what I've got to work with. My goal was to make all of the Kongs compatible with all of the games (so for instance, honey walls only appear in DKC2, so DK and Kiddy don't have animations for using them).

I've been helping out with a custom project, DKC4 The Kong's Return. All of my custom sprites are always seen first at the DKC-Atlas, then once I've gotten them to where I'm satisfied, they go to my DeviantArt page (I'm not like an "active" user, it's just a good place to keep everything in one spot). I also do custom levels, but I won't upload any of those here.

I'm going to start small here and not post everything at once. To start, here is DK.





Some of the animations in action:
On Squawks

Floating in wind

Horizontal rope

Down two ropes

Up two ropes

One rope to two

Bleak/Sideshow

With bass for end target DKC2

I'll submit more sheets at a later time. I would like to submit my custom sprites to TSR if they are willing.

[Kosheh]

Oh yeah. I thought DKC4 was a pretty cool fanproject.


you know, if you said "Yeah, I actually render these in Milkdrop and then downsample them beyond belief so they look legit" I'd believe you because...dang, these are heckin' legit, especially the DKC3-style walking DK (which I can see a little hand-drawn stuff)

[Filler]

Looks really nice. The fact that you got the style right is pretty good.

Can't wait to see more!

[Ton]

Hey, Phyre! Glad you decided to give it another go!
I've always been really impressed with these. Obviously they're not going to be perfect (The recolored GBA sprites look a bit odd, but sort of reshading the whole thing, there's not much we can do about that. The head of the forward-facing rope climbing sprites also looks about a pixel too high on the shoulders, but hey, it's still impressive!), but with what you have available, I'm not sure we can do much better. The bass guitar and horizontal rope climb really stand out as smooth and impressive to me.

I guess DKC4 fizzled out? What a shame. :/

[Phyreburnz]

Here is Diddy Kong. He has the most animations, which makes his easier to do, but also fewer that are needed.


Bleak/Sideshow

Monkey Bars attack

Teaming up with heavy Kong

Turn on Ellie

Turn on Enguarde

Turn on Rambi

Turn on Squawks

[Phyreburnz]

Here are Kiddy Kong's animations. I'm thinking about redoing a few, here.


On Rattly


Floating in wind

Up two ropes


Down two ropes

Crawling

Swinging on a rope




One rope to two

On drums


One perhaps to redo, Kiddy on a ledge

I also might redo his victory animations and maybe the skull cart animation.

Kiddy is the hardest of all of them to animate. He has the fewest number of sprites on his sprite sheet.

[Ton]

I know Kiddy is tricky, but you've done a really serviceable job with these. The only one that immediately jumps out as needing some work is the drums. Sunglasses might help? The bass drum looks oddly shaded.

Nice work!

[Phyreburnz]

I didn't do any shading on the drums at all. I took a DK barrel that was sideways and shortened it and made the drum head tan.

[Ton]

Sorry, that's what I meant, was the drum head.

[Gors]

unfortunately the original elements (that's to say, the drums and bass guitars) look really ugly and that's something that can't be solved at all due to this style being pre rendered from a 3D model. That is, you'd have to find theoriginal models, screenshot the animations andcolor reduce using the same compression algorithm the SNES games did use. Anything else not done in this way will be, at most, an emulation of the style and not accurate at all.

[Ton]

Well, really, ALL custom sprites are an emulation of the original. Phyre is just tackling a style that happens to be much harder to emulate, and I think she's done a pretty good job with what's available.

[Gors]

well duh of course

what I mean is that this style in particular can't be done in a convincing way due to the original sprites not being a handmade process. This means that the more the sprites stray away from the source material, it will never produce convincing results.

The kongs look decent thanks to the intelligent splicing and editing of the base material but still feels inferior to the rest because the fact that it's spliced means there's only a limited number of poses that can be used to represent the animations.

I find it really hard to give you actual help because this is not pixelart. But try looking for a method to mimic the artifact generation of the 3D to 2D algorithm.

[Phyreburnz]

Okay, I'm going to be a bit blunt here, because I've been treated pretty poorly here, before.

I've gotten people telling me how they like them and think they look pretty good... and then I've got somebody saying how they are inferior and don't look good and will never produce convincing results... What's the deal? Are you just that biased against splicing? Is it being against pre-rendered sprites? I just don't understand.

[Gors]

well if you think it's some grudge against you, i'll readily say that this is not the case, as i don't know you and your work is commendable

but I'm a pixelartist over anything else, and for me, they don't convince me much due to how some splice parts are reused in several frames, which makes them stick out. Sadly, this is not something you can really fix due to the very nature of the sprite style employed in the game.

Note that this is not an attack to splices or pre-rendered sprites. But since the workflow of the original graphics differ so much from your workflow, there are some things that just wont fit.

[Kosheh]

Yeah, basically all Gors is saying is that pre-rendered sprites are somewhat out of his realm to give accurate, good criticism but due to the fact it's not really the pixelart we're used to seeing, it's extremely hard to emulate the style, especially by hand like this that's saying something alone! (good things)
what you've managed to do here is indeed great, but there's only so much splicing you can do here before it's noticeable that some of the sprites you've made for the game really stick out and the suspension of disbelief is broken (it's more evident in the Kiddy sprites) I've gotta admit I've been playing DKC4 the past few days and your work so far is pretty convincing otherwise.

It's just you've got kind of a finite space to work with, and suggesting a wordaround for this is difficult as you'd need to straight-up have models of the characters from those games in order to accurately create new, ultra-convincing poses