Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: Brotoad on June 01, 2011, 04:21:50 pm
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Hi there, I'm Brotoad, I'm new here!
For a long while now, I have been developing ideas for a game called "Mashini Devata".
It's a metroidvania styled game about a planet of robots.
You take control of a young mining robot called Dex, and later 5 other characters join the party, each with their own abilities!
The story is about Dex and his team taking on the ambitious plans of an organisation known as "PROXY", who are causing havoc across the world whilst they search for the "Mashini Devata", a giant robot with god like powers named Osesvs, who is said to have created the planet.
I've been spriting for a very long time, I started back when I was 6, when I would create little mock games using our computers paint function. I stopped doing it for a very long time, but when Megaman 9 was announced, I started getting back into spriting!
After seeing all the amazing masterpices that are made by the people here, I figured this would be the best place of all to come for critisism!
I'm not abiding by any specific console style for my game, but each character in it has a unique 4 colour pallette (though a few characters share pallettes).
Every NPC in the towns of my game will be completely unique, no sprite reusing here!
Here are some of the sprites I've made so far, please tell me what you think! I really want criticism here, I think I can improve with some guidance!
(http://i949.photobucket.com/albums/ad340/CancerousTumour/MashiniDevataSprites.png)
One thing I really need to improve on is tile making, I'm really having trouble making the right texture and having enough variety in the tiles!
Here's a house I tried to make, to be honest it looks awful! (The roof is just a place holder until i can actually make a better wood texture, and i haven't made a window yet)
(http://i949.photobucket.com/albums/ad340/CancerousTumour/tilestown.png)
when it's supposed to look like this image here, it really looks terrible! http://brotoad.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3g0km1 (http://brotoad.deviantart.com/gallery/#/d3g0km1)
So please give me some criticism, I really want this game to look as good as I can make it, but I'm pretty new to making tilesets!
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Hey! They look awesome! I like the idea of a four-color palette for each character, the downside is that I like them so much, I can't give much criticism :crazy:
One thing I would say, though, is that Klez looks too bright. I'd forgo the shadows on the face and hands and go for an additional darker color to shade the clothing. He looks "all in black" yet his darkest color is actually *brighter* than others'.
Skorch's sprite looks really menacing and Tesla is incredibly cute.
Another thing that comes to mind is that, when Dex's shooting arm is in a diagonal pose, you should either make the forearm thinner or the hand wider, specially in the upwards-diagonal pose, beacause their width is too similar.
Loving them, seriously. I would play this for hours.
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Thanks for the feedback!
I wanted Klez's dark and light colours to contrast, but i found that if i made his cloak any darker it contrasted way too much! plus i kinda need the colour of his face shading for his mugshot.
I think I will make his darkest colour darker though, so thanks for the help!
Skorch is kind of an odd chracter, he looks pretty intimidating, but he is one of the heroes, and dex's best friend. He's very twitchy and impatient!
Tesla is cute, everyone seems to like her a lot!
I knew something was wrong with Dex's arms! thanks for pointing that out!
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Thanks for the feedback!
I wanted Klez's dark and light colours to contrast, but i found that if i made his cloak any darker it contrasted way too much! plus i kinda need the colour of his face shading for his mugshot.
I think I will make his darkest colour darker though, so thanks for the help!
well you don't have to make it *much*darker, just any darker will help.
Skorch is kind of an odd chracter, he looks pretty intimidating, but he is one of the heroes, and dex's best friend. He's very twitchy and impatient!
Tesla is cute, everyone seems to like her a lot!
Then you did your job well because that's exactly what I thought Skorch would be. Well, the best friend part I didn't guess.
And again, yes, tesla is lovely.The poor fried toaster at the far left is quite disturbing to boot, too.
I knew something was wrong with Dex's arms! thanks for pointing that out!
;D
Also, I like your choice of names.
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I made his cloak a bit darker and I must say it does look a lot better!
Dex and Skorch have been best friends ever since they were kids! Dex works and a miner, and Skorch is a welder!
The "fried toaster" at the end is a cameo of the "creeper" enemy from Minecraft! As far as indie game dev goes, Minecraft is a big inspiration to me, the whole area in which the creeper appears in is very loosely based on Minecraft! Well, the concept at least, it's a junkward where people scavenge during the day and hide away at night due to the zombies and ghosts that come out.
Thanks! One good thing about making a game about robots is the massive potential for references! Characters like Apollo and Clubber, and Edmond especially!
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Pea, Einhander, and Zweimoor also need a bit of contrast like Klez. Otherwise, I love these designs, and some of them are shaded remarkably well for having four colors. I'm thinking you might be able to get away with some solid shading on the larger regions, like this-
(Quick and dirty edit)
(http://img84.imageshack.us/img84/604/golemhelp.png)
Unless you're going for a more cartoony style, then it's good.
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Hmm, as badass as that edit looks, I am going for a more cartoony style, so I'll be leaving him as he is!
Einhander's lack of contrast is kinda intentional, somewhat of a reflection of his personality, but I don't think making his lighter brown a big lighter would hurt! I do definatly agree about Zweimoor and Pea though, I'll get round to fixing up their palettes!
One thing I also need to fix though is Osesvs, some of his ball joints are a bit mis-shapen, and his "spine" seems a bit wonky to me, though that might just be me nit picking for no reason!
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Hello and welcome!
Mmm, yes, these are flavoursome. The variation in silhouettes gives excellent uniqueness to each character, well done!
Main issue I see is uninteresting colour dynamics within each palette, and a lack of contrast. Sprites need to pop to work well, which translates into high contrast and a good deal of saturation:
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/edits/MashiniDevataSprites_ed-1.png)
A nice general approach for colour dynamic is to cool the shadows and warm the highlights. Boosted the saturation on nearly everything. Even grey characters are tinted by the light around them. Brightened up nearly all the highlights on everything and darkened all the darks to improve contrast.
I played around a little with a fair few of the sprites. Be especially mindful of the faces; pay careful attention to how you arrange the pixels here, as you can very quickly change the face drastically from the design you might be going for.
I spent a fair bit of time on the larger "boss" sprites, though I left Osesvs largely unfinished. Try to get as much out of your colours as possible. Reusing the brights of the eyes to highlight points of interest (such as the face and hammers of the squid and hammerbot, respectively) brings more colour dynamic to the design of the sprite, and focuses the eye more on these areas.
The other thing is to be mindful of cast shadows. Think carefully about where a subject casts a shadow onto other parts of itself. Examples are Hammy's pelvis, Nemoleague's tentacles, Osevs' shoulder, tail and neck.
Apologies for the kind of scrambled thoughts. Not a lot of sleep today :)
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I had never really thought of that! thanks a lot! Though I will edit a few things, the reason Geros pupils wre longer in his sprite is so that he didn't look crosseyed!
I do love that you fixed Tesla though, those eyes look much better, but Golems face is almost scary now, he's generally a very mild mannered character!
Not to keen on what you did with Milton and Osesvs, but i can change their palettes using more contrast!
I just hope I can keep the sprites looking as nice and contrasted as what you edited! For future sprites that is..
now i just need some help fixing those hidious wood tiles!
EDIT: i fixed up some of the things i didn't agree with that eyecraft changed but i still think everything falls in the shadow of hammy, who appears to be of a much higher quality than everyone else! any help?
(http://i949.photobucket.com/albums/ad340/CancerousTumour/NewMashiniDevataSprites-1.png)
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Okay, let's see if I can organise these thoughts...
(http://i188.photobucket.com/albums/z212/gastrop0d/edits/bot_pal_stuff_01.png)
I've grabbed a few of the sprites and shown a (pretty sloppy :lol: ) colour wheel for each of their palettes. As you probably know (but I'll go over it briefly anyway), colours that are opposite eachother on the colour wheel are complements of eachother. Using complementary colours leads to a high degree of colour dynamic. Introducing complementary elements is the basic reasoning to most of my cajoling of the colours in my original edit.
Which brings me to Golem. He is my favourite sprite amoungst the collection, and I wanted to bring special attention to him regarding the revision you made just to make sure you understand where I'm coming from. By tinting the shadow tones towards teal, we create a colour dynamic (interests the eye) and a temperature scale (harmonises with the scene). If you have a whole bunch of greys on your sprite, he is automatically the least saturated element in your scene. Your eye processes him as "grey blob" and moves on to find some colour. The large area of teal and grey on the sprite also creates a setting for the highly stimulating red-orange, allowing it to accent.
Accents concentrate colour dynamic into a focal point (or points). The setting is generally a collection of more neutral colours that have minimal dynamic with eachother, distributed over the majority of the piece. Picking greys and the muted complement of the accent works very well as a setting. The role of the setting is to starve the eye of colour dynamic, so that it wants to search for something in the image that will balance it. The eye immediately snaps to the accent, which satisfies the imbalance. For this reason accents are fantastic for faces, eyes and other points of interest (such as Hammy's hammers). In a more traditional piece (ie a painting) a key figure's clothing may be the accent of the entire composition to bring the eye to them as the person of interest.
Accents also work with tonality. You can have a setting of dark tones and an accent of a very bright tone. This is already a common element in many of your sprites; the faces are a bright white. Works well. Beware though, that colour will compete very quickly with tonality. Take Dex, for example. The orange and white compete for attention. On the portrait this is less true, but on the sprite itself, the eye continuously bounces between the face and the bright orange limbs. You might want to fiddle around there and see if you can push one of those into the setting and leave the other as the accent. Up to you.
The vast majority of the sprites I editted use complementary colour schemes. An example of a sprite that doesn't is Pea. Here we use all the colours between two complements, grading up from the coolest colour to the warmest as we move up in tonality. This is an analogous scheme. Because we have such few palette entries to work with here analogous schemes give you a stronger colour identity because all of your colours are closer to the midtone (which, assumably is the "colour" of the object you are drawing, in this case Pea is green). Pea is so green that the light is heavily tinted in towards green, pulling the colours on the wheel in towards that zone.
Next are the two purple dudes. I wanted to show how you can take two characters that you might want to have a common theme (in this case "purple") and how you can "rotate" the colour wheel of one to get a new colour wheel for the other that still shares purple as an element. This way you end up with sprites that can be similar, but still stand out as unique (though I got a little extreme in differentiating these two).
And last thing about hues I wanted to mention was monochromatic palettes. Any scheme that has all of its colours sitting on or very close to a single point on the colour wheel is termed monochromatic. With a monochromatic palette you sacrifice some tools to gain a stronger sense of mood or atmosphere. The thing you sacrifice is colour dynamic (obviously). Establishing a temperature shift becomes extremely difficult, so you run the risk of isolating the piece from the rest of the composition. Sometimes that can be desirable (especially in games), though, but you have to be careful that the context you are isolating the element in makes sense. For example, imagine we had every sprite in a game harmonised with their scenes except for ONE. Except for this weird colour difference, there is no other reason, no context, for the sprite to be set apart from the others. This creates a conceptual dissonance in the player's mind. Dissonance is the feeling of chaos, nonsense, lostness. It is extremely unpleasant, and ultimately you don't want your graphics to be unpleasant, right? :)
Which brings me to Tesla. I know you like her as purple. The monochromatic scheme creates a mood regarding her; it communicates an aspect of her character. But is that style going to sit next to the style of Hammy? If you have a context for why she can be like that and Hammy like that, it will sit with the player's subconcious just fine. Otherwise there will be a dissonance, however slight it might be. The context can be something like "all the key characters are monochrome as a visual metaphor for their role within the party of good guys", or it could be "all the girls are monochrome because female robots are extremely unique in the setting and a key part of the robot's culture". Etc etc. If this is explained to the player, be it explicitly or implicitly, it will be fine. In fact, it will be very interesting.
That's kind of abstract though. If you want reliable, functional graphics it's probably best to stick with consistent methods across the spritework.
OKAY. That was kind a bit of a ramble. My brain went to a place I didn't know existed. But there it is.
I threw in a revised version of Tesla with more colour dynamic as a suggestion of something you can do that keeps the theme of "purple" but introduces temperature scale. Notice how it catches the eye more than the monochromatic version.
Final thing I wanted to talk about was splitting the palette into definite zones of light and shadow. I think this is one of the reasons Hammy pops so much. The key action when shading an object is dividing the form into areas of shadow and light, so it makes sense so divide our tones along those lines as well, especially when we have such few palette entries to work with. One problem, however, is that as our sprites get smaller, outlines start to take up a greater proportion of the canvas space, so we are left with less room to perform shading. Pixel clusters also become much more influential at smaller sizes, so shading areas become submissive to the clarity demands of the pixel clusters.
In short, shading comes undone with smaller sprites. Your main tools become lines, shapes and colours. It makes sense, then, that for smaller sprites you divide your colours up to maximise the expression you can get with these three tools. You want a nice dark outlining colour that all the other colours contrast with. This is why on the tonal scale I have next to Pea you can see the darkest tone sits really low on the scale and the others are pushed more up into the top half of the scale. I still generally try to adhere to the shadow/light division where I can, though.
I can't remember if that was everything, but those are the thoughts I have at the moment. I hope they are helpful. ^-^
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that was a good read, but it did help me understand quite a bit more!
(http://i949.photobucket.com/albums/ad340/CancerousTumour/stuff-1.png)
i must say that although that further shaded nemoleague looks amazing, it doesn't fit in with the shading style of the other characters! i did transfer that new palette over though!
as for tesla, i went in the other direction as i much prefer her hair being a darker colour, so i blued up her darker colour!
same with golem, it actually ended up suiting him better, considering golem comes from a snowy region!
as for the face edit you made, i rather keep his mouth smaller. you most likely haven't seen his artwork, but he has a rather small mouth, with his helmet having a protective "jaw" that covers his chin. as his smaller mouth is the one used for talking and conveying emotions, i consider it to be much more important!
i really love how you made it seem as if nemoleague and hammy are being bathed in a warm sunset though, i'm definatly going to try and continue with the other characters! however i'm having a little trouble getting osesvs to look as lush! maybe thats appropiate though? considering osesvs is encountered in the centre of the planet.
as for the part about the heroes being monotonous to symbolise something, i'm definatly not artsy enough to think up something like that, so i will get around to fixing them up!
if only i had discovered this place earlier! AKA when i hadn't made so many characters, it would have been much easier to adapt this back them than now when i have so many!