Beat'em Up Character Sprites

[ennui]

hey there. this is my first post here and this is my first pixel art since making recoloured pokemon when I was in primary school.

I started with the guy on the left, then after reading some tutorials and posts here I came up with the guy on the right. not sure where to go from here, they're not feeling good and I'm not sure why.



and here's a mini version because I am aware of cave story.



I figured it was a good idea to get him kind of solid before I moved on to animating him.

[Manupix]

Not bad for a start! Welcome! 

There are anatomy issues: limbs are short, arms/forearms of unequal length.
The faces need more attention to readability.

Congrats for trying to build an organic palette right away, but it's too random.
Saturation is way too high (almost half the colors have 100% sat!), so the darks used for shading look weird; you need a wider range of near-neutrals but should avoid pure greys. The brightest green and purple are just too garish and should be skipped.
There is uneven shading contrast: low on legs and beards, high on coats. This also results from the unbalanced palette.
You'll have to arrange your colors in various combinations to see how they work together (right now they don't). Arrange them by value, then by hue, for starters; tweak as needed.

[ennui]

thanks for the crits. I put in a few hours tonight, I knocked the saturation off in GIMP, and tried to balance the colours a bit. worked off your main crits. tried to build the structure overall, with mixed success. I'm not sure what you meant about the face but I tried to give it a little more definition. I also tweaked the pose a little to make it a better fighting stance. I'm still not happy with it but I think it's a step in the right direction. I started laying out the palette a little better but got caught up in more major edits.

[Manupix]

Much better already!

I'm not sure what you meant about the face

That pixels were not obviously related to features or volume, esp on the left guy. Way more readable now, but the nose outline is still a bit weird: this color reads as shadow everywhere but obviously can't be shadow on the lit side.
Not sure about a fix, since the bright skin tone is close from the nose highlight. Maybe give the guy a pink nose, since he looks somewhat like a bum already

Shading of the arms is messy, volumes aren't obvious. His left forearm should cast a shadow on the torso but not necessarily on the jacket flap, as light would get in between upper- and forearm.
On his right arm, light would reach the forearm underside more than the upper, and the whole upper arm right side should be darker.

[ennui]

the nose advice was genius. when I started out I made an oekaki painting (awful) that had a red nose. don't know how it got dropped. and you're right, he is a bum, the game I'm working on is called Beach Bum Beatdown and it's supposed to be kind of funny.


he also got his first enemy, I tried applying what I learned here, but it's looking kind of awful at the moment. oh well lol.


I also started blocking out the game screen. inb4 tiles.

[astraldata]

Looking nice with the SNK style you have going. I can definitely get a sense for the 3d forms.

Though, one suggestion I have is to consider moving the bum's arms/fists farther apart and even enlarging the fists because it looks like a big-head mode otherwise. I don't get a sense of "I wanna punch!" from your bum guy without some hams to hit with.

Also, that beach sand is just burning my eyes! Try more of a darker skin tone like the brightest hue on the speed-o guy, or even a less-saturated orange. It will help a lot if you keep the varied palette style you're going for.

Finally, with the sky being there with no sense of water or otherwise making it appear sunny, your game, I feel, is going to have a dull vibe to it if you're not careful with the desaturated colors. They can work, but you'll have to be moderate with them (i.e. mainly use them in your sprites, but keep your BGs a little more saturated to make up for it, as it seems to give you a unique-looking style here other than the crits I mentioned.)

[ennui]

Looking nice with the SNK style you have going.

stop it.

and yeah, those background colours irked me as soon as I uploaded them, thanks for the crits, haven't had time to implement them because of real life.  . here's what I managed to scratch out between breaking the codebase and appointments:



I know it's still a desert but I figured I'd do the backgrounds in sprites and parallax. and I'm aware of tiles, figured I should know how to sell sand first. I think a brighter more saturated yellow highlight in the foreground might help.

[astraldata]

Are those clouds? If so, you probably shouldn't use pure grey -- perhaps a light blue hue akin to what you did with the distant clouds would work better?

I have a few nitpicks about the baddie blonde dudes I forgot to mention in my previous post. The first, most noticeable, one is that he looks like he's got huge monkey-lips. Only when you zoom in do you see the facial structure you were attempting, and only if you look hard. The way to fix this is to keep in mind the light source is coming from the top front (apparently) so that means that any important parts of the face should catch the light more than others (whether or not it's completely realistic), and in this case, the bottom lip should catch the light because, as it stands, it looks like his lips are recessed inside his mouth or that he has really large lips. If you still want the chin to catch some light, you can move its light down a pixel to chisel out both the bottom lip *and* the chin. You should be able to keep the light on the top lip as is though to give him that ape-like look he has now (which is kind of funny -- just minus the huge lip effect.)

The only other nitpick is that the toenail/big-toe on the outside foot of the blonde dude seems to be on the wrong side of the foot (he really does have 2 left feet.)

Other than that, I can't really crit the background since I'm not sure what you're going for with it -- atm it looks like a dessert, but you said this was a beach-bum game, so I dunno. Hope what I did point out helps you out a bit.

[ennui]

no progress over the weekend, but I do have a sound guy now.

took my first swing at animating. it's a little rough, not sure what to do about the jacket.

[ennui]

haven't posted much art. trying to get the code side of the project together enough to post something. (probably just endless mode with one enemy type spawning in randomly over and over) then I guess I'm going to go on a scenery and character blitz to figure out where I want to go with story mode.

started on a start screen. I think it needs more colours/better compostion. the lump in the middle is going to be an island.



crazy tired of this, but I think it's going to get fun after the alpha.