AuthorTopic: [C+C] Alien walking animation (tips for shading and arm movement)  (Read 1779 times)

Offline pixlMan

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Hello, for the last weeks I've been slowly trying to create simple pixelart characters that I can use in my game. Finally yesterday I created this Alien character and animated him in a way that can be use in an early build of my game. Can you tell me how to improve the animation? It is a little choppy right now seeing that it is only 6 frames but that is ok for now. My main problem is with the shading, I know something can be done but I couldn't figure it out, and lastly I don't like the arm movement and couldn't find a good solution for it. You can edit my sprites if you want to show me the improvements.

Yes, the left and right walking animations are mirrored, I still haven't decided on a workflow so I didn't want to draw everything from the beginning to make the other side of the walking animation.




Offline Runensucher

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What is wrong about a mirrored animation? I feel like this is a well executed work. It feels smooth and lively (in a "game sprite" way).
There is something about the back arm that bothers me: It expands in a strange way when it swangs forward.
Similar goes for the feet. Why do they grow and shrink while moving?

Now to the shading:
The shading of the front and the back view gives your alien a "perfectly" round head. What it hasn't.
And there is something else: Your alien doens't have a neck in the side view.

The darker colours of the shirt look off. It's like the alien has some pit-stains. Try to use only one colour to shade the shirt and the trousers. It's okay for a sprite of this size.

Offline pixlMan

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About the mirroring I've heard that just mirroring the sprite is a hack and not good practice but I'm a beginner right now and trying different stuff.

About the feet shrinking and growing if I got it correctly you are talking about the walking up and down animation. Well it was the best way for me to show that the feet move back and forth. Drawing the up and down animation is my biggest problem because of this reason. How would you do it? I also noticed the back arm movement but anything else that I did looked somehow off.

I'll try to make the shading of the head look more natural, should be easy. The Alien doesn't have a neck because that is how I first imagined the characters to be. Maybe adding a neck will make the head movements also look more natural.

The darker colors of the shirt are also a problem that I have with the shading, I couldn't make it look good. The arm stains as you said where part of the outline if I remember correctly, to emphasize that the alien has arms that move. If I had only two colors I believe people wouldn't notice the arm movement.

Offline wzl

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About the mirroring I've heard that just mirroring the sprite is a hack and not good practice but I'm a beginner right now and trying different stuff.

less of the first, more of the latter!
Hearsay of good/bad practice is a double edged sword. first of all, take all opinions to heart, and analyze them. second, figure out of this particular thing does apply to your case.

Flipping animations in your case is fine. the sprite is symmetrical, aside from the shirt logo, which can be added on top of the mirrored one if you want.
the more complex your animations become, the less inclined you will be to manually redraw them instead of simply flipping.
you can see this in a lot of games, where they switch sword-hands when turning around, being the result of flipped sprite-sheets. its not bad practice, its efficient. Its not accurate, but most games get away with it.