Hi, thesydneylad. I think your blue guy is cool. I read him as if he's wearing kind of a dog-ear cap, perhaps of a medieval-esque variety. I know you're probably going for a robot man (given Mega Man Legends is your reference point) so we perhaps should consider how to make him look a little more like a robot.  I hope you don't mind I did a little edit of your sprite to illustrate a few points:



A few things I tried you could also try:

1. Made him darker on the whole so the highlights I did use read more like shiny metal. He's a robot! Contrast is helpful.
2. Clarified some segmentations in the body, so it looks like he's got a breast plate and a canon robot arm and black boots etc.
3. Gave him a dog-eared robot cap because I like that from the beginning, why not?
4. I recommend you play around with 4 color palettes (like the original game boy!) spanning the field from very dark to very bright with a couple of middle colours in there and play with that until you draw stuff that you show to people and they can immediately tell what you're going for with just that color range. It's a great exercise.

 
Personally I went with this sprite as a side-scrolling sprite, perhaps you'll like it even if it's not top-down.

Thanks for reading!

re: Pixelation is Dead, attracting new members, being popular

More technically savvy people than me will synthesize what we'll come up with and figure out the best way to present Pixelation in this glorious web 2.0 reality. Your contributions are very necessary and welcome and thank you for posting in this thread with your thoughts, keep doing that!

However I wanted to communicate a spirit-of-the-thing related point of view that plays into the future of the platform in a significant way, and also in this way to touch on some criticism on the current state of affairs. I post this now because no discussion of how to be popular again will be solid without considering what it is we would endeavor to make popular again, exactly.

The core function of Pixelation as a community is that it brings artists of less experience or skill in contact with those with more experience and skill in order to exchange ideas and help each other. It's not to have a hex collab or secret santa. Activities certainly foster a community, but if it's indeed true that only 4 people care about the core function of Pixelation at this point, it's not going to be assuaged with bells and whistles of any kind.

And if it's only 4 people on the boards in the end, that's fine, as long as those 4 people are getting help with their pixel art.

Pixelation has always struggled with growth, because it's an art forum. We don't advertise, we don't make money, we don't have a 5 year plan or anything like that, we are not marketing gurus or very business-minded. Unchecked expansion and growth aren't really the point. Pixelation's prime concern is to attract the people that might benefit from it, not become bigger and bigger every year at all costs.

On that front, I want to address what can be done to help Pixelation become available to those that might need it, and how you can help, if you care and still have love in your heart for Pixelation.

1. Once we're up and running again and have got a handle on our tech, and only then, it'll be the time for everyone of you that has ever gotten better at pixel art here that's still reading this and cares, to put out the word on twitter or other social media that Pix is  back and has refocused on the educational aspect of pixel art. Not just 'as it was before' but better.

2. That means, yes, this is going to be a 'boring place', because places for learning are boring if you're not looking to learn in them. This isn't an entertainment site, and although knowledge and socialization of a craft are very exciting to me, if you do not come in Pix in good faith (that is, to learn or help others learn) then there's not many shits and giggles to find here. This is by design, and that design is only going to be streamlined and sharpened further in the future.

Whatever Pixelation loses in terms of internet-lulz-related-edge it will gain by being a safe and respectful environment for artists to grow in. That's our core benefit and we plan to redraft (and drastically condense) our ruleset soon to promote this atmosphere even further without unwarranted byproducts of elitist gatekeeping and 'either do the hard work or get out, scrub' unspoken assumptions we may have fostered in the past. Hindsight is 20/20 on that front.

3. Once we're up and running and the call has been put out by anyone and everyone that cares, I sincerely implore you (and this won't be the last time) to put in even 5-10 minutes a week picking up someone's thread with their pixel art and helping them. I will be doing this as well, I am 34 years old and swamped with work constantly, but I'll put in the effort. I'll even trade you critique-for-critique if that helps. Even if it's just 5-10 people at first, as long as we help each other, we keep things not just civil but proactively kind-hearted and we persist, the word will go out that we're back in business and serious about both helping beginners of all backgrounds, and about providing a safe environment for them to learn in. Whatever growth we can achieve by cleaning our old forum tech etc. will only become substantial if we can keep on with this mission statement.




As this conversation evolves (both internally and public-facing) I'll go into more detail about how to clarify and future-proof our community culture (from ruleset to recommended critique style) so that something like what just happened won't happen again. This is a large discussion in itself and I've got a lot of thoughts I want to bounce off of you.

If anyone has any questions or thoughts concerning any of the above, I'm all ears and I'll do my best to reply. Pixelation, as always, works best when all of us put our heads together and come up with a gameplan.

Pixelation is a place of learning, and as such it's not just about craft. It's about a healthy community spirit and an inclusive atmosphere. Tolerating far-right viewpoints, sexism, misogyny and bigotry of all types in an art community while just focusing on the craft is a recipe for disaster for a myriad of reasons. Pixelation is restructuring because it has to, because we can do better than this.

Interesting discussion in this thread. I tend not to check up on this stuff much anymore because I've been generally disappointed at how hurtful people often are about their perceived necessity of these techniques that I had a part in shaping. But it's good to see new thought generated on the subject!

I think the linear ramp from oekaki to blurry-whatever is on one hand intuitive and clear as to what it means and therefore a useful tool but it still has a limitation in that I don't think clean and controlled, no-aa, no-dither, not a lot of single pixels work is necessarily in a middle point of the thought process of the artist that makes these choices. I think the 'middle' as it were is also a position of greater depth so - from my point of view, at least - we're back to a more three-dimensional example or perhaps a triangle. If the core of the work is of that 'depth' then it will withstand a lot of noisy nonsense on a more surface level, or a lot of blurry soft tools.

It is in a triangulation of that idea that I agree with you, Cure and concur that one can have very very controlled cluster work and then put all the lighting FX works on top of it and it will not hurt the clusters. Your example with the lady with the gradient hair is kind of brilliant for that, and it also has a historical precedent on the Amiga, where you have very pixelly pixel art and copper blitter backgrounds like in Enemy: Tempest of Violence or Lionheart.

That's why for me a strict definition of pixel art just judging by formalism is kind of a fool's errand. One first has to have the skills, the experience and possibly the intuitive idea of what tightly created pixel art looks like, why and how, and then they can take a loooot of nonsense on top without any problem, the thing is still cohesive and rings true. Just looking at the picture as if its a flat thing and examining every pixel (a 'machine pass' of 'is it pixel-art?' if you will) will not do, the eye will have to make creative judgement calls about where work went in and if it is enough to hold the whole thing together.

It's the same artist's eye that someone gets about oil painting as well. Bad oil painting seems off even if there's a few bits of the canvas where the brush strokes fell down sympathetically. And Good oil art is also apparent even if someone then took a picture of their canvas and photomanipulated it here and there.

Here's some ancient Amiga art (quite impressive) done with floating assets as you describe. There's pros and cons.

http://francksauer.com/index.php/games/15-games/published-games/9-unreal