Thanks for the comments, everyone.


This is what I have thus far; I need to sleep now, so I'll tackle most everything I haven't responded too tomorrow when I resume working on this. Like providing an example of how it looks with the character on it. I made the middle tree and left tree taller and shaded them and have begun work on another middle ground tree. After this I imagine most of the trees will exist more in the background then the foreground.

Do note, the gradient that starts to build up will mostly be obscured by trees. I'll also probably even out the brightness of the snow a little bit from the main path and the back layers. The idea is its in shadow (I also want the area the main character walks on to stand out more) but I think the execution is a little extreme for the idea right now.

As for dealing with the pixel-wide scraggly branches in the trees up front, I'd like to keep them - at least for now - because I feel like a majority of the trees character results from those. But, if it begins to interfere with some of the BG layers further back I'll have to deal with them. EDIT: Unless you actually meant remove the scraggly branches from future trees that would exist in the BG? in which case I plan on doing that.

In fact I imagine I'll probably end up rearranging and altering a lot of the different background features I have by the time I'm done, to help compensate for the backlayer. This is after all the first time I've actually attempted a background quite like this.

the DS games are full of bad art. If you want to learn the style they degenerated from look for SOTN sprites.

Actually some of the DS sprites are pretty decent; I rather enjoy Soma's spritesheet from DoS myself. Most of the others are pretty bad, though.

In general Castlevania is a very mixed bag. Environments especially are usually quite ugly and look like they took five different tilesets and cobbled them all togetherp

I do not think that we are playing the same castlevanias.

There's nothing wrong with having no direction and messing around creating randomness but this is bound to happen when there's no concept driving your decisions.
I recommend you try to solidify a concept beforehand next time, with some quick exploratory sketches on good ol' paper with a good ol' pencil. Know what you're doing before you do.

Well of course, I always plan out what I'm doing if its something important, like for a project or to use as an avatar or something, but in an instance like this where I'm literally just spriting to sprite/ for fun, there really isn't that 'need' for creative control; I just kind of let the ideas flow and evolve.

Crit on yer sprite though - I can say that I love the active pose you gave him, and yes it's rather odd, looks like Samus's boyfriend maybe playing volleyball at the beach, not wanting to get sand in his boots of course.

Thanks The pose was kind of a pain to get right and was really the only true guiding factor in the sprites construction.

Wow, for the most part that looks excellent. My only real complaints are that its a little messy, though that may just be style, and the green palette used. There isn't much contrast or hue-shift in it, and it just feels like it's kinda sitting there.  I'm also not a huge fan of the fact that there's a black line ontop of the water. Aside from that though, it looks quite good.

Have you made any progress on the two linearts you posted earlier? I'd be kind of interested in seeing some more complete sprites out of those.

Either that or I'll move this thread there for you. What do you prefer? O:

Here. I wasn't really asking for critique on the sprite but rather if it was felt that that sprite dealt with the issue of black and white and the apparent lack of contrast more in regards to the game itself - I'll make a mockup of the sprite on an in-game BG though for comparison if that'll work betterr? It wasn't my intention to lean it towards sprite critique.  As for the sprites and stuff I'll make a thread over there later on, as this is more trying to deal with specifically the black and white/gray/contrast issues and on whether or not on the whole it is capturing the intended atmosphere or how exactly to capture that kind of atmosphere. Or even just move this more towards those concepts and guide it away from the game in question, either way it works and is something I'm interested in.

Jad: Ok, that's cool then. Do post it against a background though, so we have more stuff to look at.