Fighter Jet help

[Fake_Kraid]

I'm planning on making a sprite-based Coldwar era jet fighter game sometime in the near future that will sort of be like a super over the top version of the old game Sopwith 2 with mouse control, plane purhacing and upgrades, stuff like that. It will be all multiplayer like say Counter Strike or DotA. Anyway, side scrolling action in a nut shell though I guess a better description would be 2d-scroller since you can go up and down too, not just sideways, but anyway.

I'm trying to makes some sprites for coldwar era jets starting with this one of a Mig-21. The mig is the bottom most plane with a F-8 crusader and F-5 tiger II above that I've been using as a reference since I like their style (both from the sprites of the old SNES game UN Squadron).

Criticism and pointers are very much desired, thanks.

[huZba]

Oh this is a tough one. To give the fighter proper likeness to the real thing in such small size. How it looks currently doesn't really look like a mig-21. The most important defining feature is the intake on the nosecone, so make it a different color, maybe just black and bigger too. At that size you might need to consider making some details bigger than they actually are to make the plane more recognizable. If you have trouble distinguishing different parts of the plane in greyscale, use a camo that separates the parts.

[Fake_Kraid]

Hmmm, yeah, you had a good point there, the nosecone didn't scream Mig-21 enough.

I didn't like how the main fuselage looked at 5 pixels high though, which is what I would need for a 3 pixels high nose cone that could look like a proper triangle so I tried just making the nose cone two pixels wide and kind of fudging the angle a bit. I'm actually pretty happy with the result. It definately looks better than the original.

I also gave the front of the fuselage a more uniform height which I think helps to communicate the plane's overall cigartube-like quality. I Shortened the wings a bit as well, it was looking too hang gliderish.

Thanks man. Keep in mind that the on screen size is probably going to be like how they look after one click of magnifing on here.