AuthorTopic: Sprite interpretations  (Read 72654 times)

Offline EyeCraft

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #30 on: May 18, 2010, 01:42:12 am
I never imagined your process would be so involved, Arne!

I've wanted to participate in this forever, but I struggle to think of games that feel appropriate. Must... think... harder...  :yell:

Offline Arne

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #31 on: June 14, 2010, 09:25:53 pm


Also, some quick pixel play with the player sprite and palettes. The superbright palette of the player character is different from the 'Chiaroscuro' of the two enemy palettes, and the light-shadow shading (rather than flat colors) made things hard to read. Given how brown the game is, the main character should probably be blue. A lot of the backgrounds are dark, but I think black lines survive pretty well, judging by the enemies. Some Faxanadu screenshots and info.



Faxanadu does some interesting things with the mist (just putting the background in the foreground I suppose) and it also appears to be streaming in tiles into the tile tables as it needs them. This can be seen if observing the tile tables in the RAM while playing. During a conversation, letter tiles will gradually appear, and the mist is animated by replacing tiles.

Chick inspired by the sexy Xanadu cover. Otherwise, there are a lot of  bare chested men in this game series.
« Last Edit: June 14, 2010, 09:34:48 pm by Arne »

Offline Jad

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #32 on: June 15, 2010, 09:09:59 am
Haha, yeah, I sorta wondered why you'd suddenly paint all 80's bangs-style chicks - although I dig it lots : D
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Offline Arne

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #33 on: July 03, 2010, 08:32:35 pm
I'm interested in both 80's1 and late 70's2 animé style. It's more appealing than 90's for sure.

1Because I recently played Chaos Angels for the MSX.

2Starzinger for example, long faces with a pronounced nose ridge and narrow eyes.

Quickies:


Experiment. What makes a character recognizable? Color certainly plays a huge role. In other cases a silhouette is very important of course (Mickey Mouse). When I redesign sprites I try to preserve the main features and their relative placement, and this goes for the color chunks as well, even if it's just a few pixels on the sprite. See my take on Samus as an example.

Offline Ai

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #34 on: July 05, 2010, 06:47:08 am
I didn't get very far into my Air Fortress project.

Psycho Fox
hmm.. not a bad idea. I may try that.

Quote
The SMS had more colors per sprite than the NES, but I haven't really seen a SMS game with delicious pixel art. Maybe I just haven't seen enough games. The SMS used a 6-bit_RGB palette, and according to the gfx specs it used two 16 color palettes with colors from the 64 color (r4*g4*b4) palette, one for the FG (sprites) and one for the BG.


Oddly enough, you might be better off looking at the Game Gear for more interesting pixel art. It has a 4096-color master palette compared to the SMS's 64; for example the art for the GG sonic games easily beats the SMS ones even though it has less pixels on-screen. It just plain looks more interesting.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8iNPRBeF9s seems like a good illustration. at about 1:58, I find that pretty impressive looking

I'm considering doing something like this activity, and looking at games like:

* Starquake
* Switchblade
* Super Cauldron
* Knight Tyme
* Hydrofool
* Sweevo's World
* Batman (the isometric game by Jon Ritman/Bernard Drummond)
EDIT:
* knight lore
* nightshade
:)
« Last Edit: July 05, 2010, 07:54:02 am by Ai »
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Offline 7321551

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #35 on: July 05, 2010, 10:24:30 am
Hey Arne: do you find interpreting Mega Drive sprites more or less inspiring than those on the NES & Master System? I was working on some Mega Drive interpretations—it's the system I'm most familiar with—but the sprites are so comparatively detailed it feels like I have to actively modify the character to interpret it in a substantial way, whereas those other systems are pleasantly ambiguous.

(apparently there was a Master System Golden Axe, but the MD & Arcade versions were more definitive so I'm kind-of assuming you used that—in any case, the sprites in the port look pretty large too)

Offline Arne

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #36 on: July 05, 2010, 10:15:34 pm
StarQuake has an awesome title, and the game looks interesting too, even though I'm no big fan of blobby characters. It's the one thing which bothers in Gimmick for the NES too.

Yeah, it's less interesting to redesign hi-def stuff, and I too feel like I have less room to play around without violating the design. In the case of Golden Axe, it started out kind of hi-def, then they made the C64 version etc. Not sure how to go about that. I once made some redesigns of the sprites from the Atari 2600 version of Galaxian though. They look like large legged mecha rather than bugs. At one point I wanted to redesign the Atari force universe.

These old 1:72 miniatures are fun to reinterpret.
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Offline 0xDB

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #37 on: July 27, 2010, 02:54:48 pm
Hey. Hey! Been lurking in this thread for quite some time now and ever since I first saw it I thought "great idea! I want to do the Gianna Sisters(and went on wondering for months why noone did them yet).".

I find your drawings highly inspirational Arne and you make it look like it's really fun and not hard to do at all. :)

So today I found some time and started working on The Gian(n)a Sisters (even tried to mimic your process a bit or what I think to see to be your process, hehe).

work in progress (good construction practice for me as well):


Reference: http://www.lemon64.com/giana/ (and of course countless hours of playing the game)

update (starting to feel a bit like I'm doing it wrong(adding too many details which just aren't there in the original sprites) but I'm having fun, so it must be right):


update2 (the little bug always looked more like a small mini-turtleish creature to me (also I kept reading 'the eye' as a lion when I was a kid, should probably doodle that as well))
« Last Edit: July 28, 2010, 05:53:56 pm by Dennis »

Offline Arne

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #38 on: July 31, 2010, 12:29:15 am
Nice! I've actually done Giana Sisters (and Hard'n Heavy). I might have taken that stuff offline though. When you compare GS to SMB, you notice all those little touches which made SMB great, like the collision feedback (blocks bouncing, turtle shells, sound design, etc).

Offline ptoing

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Re: Sprite interpretations

Reply #39 on: July 31, 2010, 02:41:33 pm
also I kept reading 'the eye' as a lion when I was a kid

I am glad to know I was not the only one.
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