[wip] My Hunter

[freespyryt]

Hey all
I'm just starting to make a treasure hunting type game with my boyfriend and I'm doing the art for the game, including the characters. This is my first time doing any kind of pixel art so critique and tips are both greatly appreciated.
Update:
That's my first attempt at a character which I'm hoping will eventually resemble:

I'm not terribly pleased about my shading, but I'm totally new at this so again, please help me make this usable! I don't want him to look exactly like that, obviously my proportions are aimed to be different as this is supposed a top down 3/4 kind of game (like Pokemon) rather than face on. Thanks for taking the time to help me with this!

[Chrispy]

That is very, very tiny. I don't think I'll be able to critique this correctly with its small size. It's hard to make out most of it.

[Lizzrd]

I disagree. The size is quite ok.

You should "sew" together the arms and the torso though.

[freespyryt]

Thanks to both of you!
Lizzrd: Do you mean like, delete some of the darker lines that separate the torso and the arms? I'm just wanting to clarify what you meant.  

[7321551]

Too small? He's a few pixels taller than Link in Link To The Past! & fighting inhumanely small dimensions is half the fun, right?

He looks nothing like your reference, but I wouldn't bother - he's got enough character of his own, & the ref is far too detailed. Anyway, I made you an edit.

step 1:

step 2:


*I drew over it with a new grayscale ramp, to try to get an idea of the shape. Yours had emphasis on uniform detail - little dots scattered around to represent hair, etc., which was making it a bit flat.
*As a consequence, I decreased the amount of colors used. I just like to do that.
*Tried to give it a light-source.
*When the shape (values) looked alright, I just adjusted hue & saturation until I thought it looked good.
edit: & good luck!

[EyeCraft]

Hello and welcome to Pixelation 

Quite a good start, especially considering you haven't pixelled before. I think 7321551's edit has hit most points, but I wanted to mention that you should avoid off-centre light sources like the one he has used. This is because it prevents you from mirroring directions of your sprites without them having jumpy/inconsistent lighting.

Can you give us any information about the game? Mainly what resolution it's in and any colour restrictions? Also what environment(s) will it be set in?

[freespyryt]

7321551: Thank you!!! I really appreciate the effort you put into that. It looks amazing! I'll try and implement that--the lighting was definitely needing to be fixed.
EyeCraft: My boyfriend and I are still working out the resolution. We may have to increase the character's size to fit in a 640x480 resolution game, which I think is what we're leaning towards. The settings I think is mostly going to be a mountain town in caves and mountains and dungeons, but we're unsure on the specific theme (we were also thinking kind of steam punk as a general theme). But that's all a work in progress, and we were just sure we wanted our main guy to look like that. I don't think there are really any color restrictions, but for the character we'd like to stick to greens and browns and blue for the goggles, yellow for the belt. The main character will be "treasure hunting" and he's going to be carrying weapons. Again, we're not sure on complete specifics but I'll let you know any updates I get. Thank you again for your help, that's awesome!

[Kælaar]

god, 640x480 is so yesterday >.>.
hit up the standard 1024x768 imo, also when designing a game its useful to work everything out before hand and make either a document,wiki, or notebook containing every detail about the game.
you dont want to "play it by ear." i know thats a bit OT but i think its important to be aware of.
As for the Character, it is very small but, small can be a great way to learn with pixel art. Animation is waaaaay easier the smaller it is.
The sprite looks very flat, the boots and body mainly Although i must say
for a first attempt its pretty good =P. Adding a light source from the center would make it more 3Dish and would eliminate any lighting issues in the game as Eyecraft suggested.
also i dont know what program your using, but if you want a pretty good pixel art program check out: http://www.humanbalance.net/gale/us/ Although not as professional as say photoshop
its simplicity and design make for a pretty sweet combo. Good luck =) hope that helps at least a little bit.

[freespyryt]

Kaelaar: We're still not stuck on that. At this point we're using google docs to document the entireity of the game, but we're still ironing all the details out as we speak. And thank you! I was unsure of how it would go but I'm proud of my little hunter. I was trying to add a center lightsource without making him look fat, so I'm trying to figure out how that's going to work out. I'm currently using graphics gale as my pixel program and it's working great! Thank you for your input!

[7321551]

Woah. 640x480 & 1024x768 might be appropriate resolutions for large, truecolor graphics (ie. smooth color transitions & automatic-antialiasing), but for pixel-art it will probably be prohibitively time-consuming, & maybe pointless. To put it in perspective, here are some low-res overhead examples: 1, 2. Do you anticipate needing to depict more detail than that? If not, I would just use something like 320x240 & scale-up by x3 or x4.

[freespyryt]

7321551: My boyfriend suggested we do the 320x240 size, and we'll probably go with that. The things you sent me are probably about the level of detail I'll be working with. I'll probably end up doing that, Thank you!

[freespyryt]

Here's an update on the progress of my little man
Original:
Update:
I tried to make him less flat, and remove the arm sectioning, and I changed the colors to be less bright, but I still feel it could use improvement. As you can see I also changed the tunic, goggle, and hair colors around to get a feel for a different set of colors. Thanks again!

[EyeCraft]

Try to stick to very simple and obvious pixel cluster shapes at this size sprite. Keep things in big, simple, readable blocks of colour. The hair for instance is noisy and doesn't read very well, same as the stuff happening on the chest of the tunic.

Also avoid working on a white canvas, it messes up your eye's judgement on contrast.

[freespyryt]

Thank you, thank you, thank you! You really helped me figure out that hair. It's no perfect, but I think it's improved some
Original:
Update:
I also changed the collar a bit to make it more..swooshy? It fits around the face better. And the glasses are bigger than before. Anyways, continued suggestions are always helpful, and thanks again Eyecraft for the advice!

[turfsurfer]

Its just a thought, but right now your sprite has much bigger hair than your illustration, you might be able to get yourself some more space for detail in the body if you were to cut down the size of his hair. Personally I'm also a bigger fan of the less saturated colors in your original drawing, if you intend to include that blue glow at some point having a less saturated character will make it easier to have the blue pop and seem like its lighting up. Either way its coming along very nicely.

[FrostPumpkin]

Its just a thought, but right now your sprite has much bigger hair than your illustration

It has a bigger head too, but it's absolutely normal. It's a small sprite so he needed to change proportions to make it more readable.

[freespyryt]

Thanks for the suggestions! The reason I made it so big was because it's supposed to be a 3/4 view. I'm just experimenting with colors at this point, but i'll keep it in mind.
(And by the way, I'm a girl  )

BTW--There's an update! Any more suggestions are welcome as usual!

[Gil]

Personally I'm also a bigger fan of the less saturated colors in your original drawing.

Just to avoid confusion, she did not draw that image herself, it's official art from a game called Torchlight.

[freespyryt]

Oh my bad, I was assuming most people would know that it was from torchlight or a game of some kind  I didn't mean to imply that I drew the original. I just posted it from that game because that was the kind of look I was going for. Sorry!

[Trub]

Your new version seems to have lost some of the contrast you had achieved before. Plus the neck/cape thingy is melding into arms which makes him look funnier. But great work, I'm fairly new to all this as well so I feel kind of connected to this thread?

[freespyryt]

I noticed the melding and I'm trying to fix it but I'm having a hard time doing so without making something look bulky or just..off.
Update:
I changed up the colors a bit, to see if I could get better contrast. This little bugger is hard to get right! I guess it's just all about learning new techniques, of which I have many to learn.

[Trub]

Also have a close look at EyeCrafts changes and why he has done them (I am speaking from experice here). Your yellow belt is too circular plus it looks like its not attached. Your legs look a little awkward (though this is under close scrutiny). The folds and shading make his sprite more defined and relistic. Increase the contrast. Also compare the colour count if your worrying about the size of file and stuff like that. Hope this is helpful.

[turfsurfer]

Just to avoid confusion, she did not draw that image herself, it's official art from a game called Torchlight.

Aah, well that changes things, I guess just keep saturation in mind for what its worth then.

I do agree with what trub is saying about the legs though, it looks like his knees are knocking together because of the placement of the highlights under his belt, they probably also look a little odd because they are the only part of the sprite that is a flat color with a solid outline, you might be able to use some of the darker shades from the hair to add some depth without expanding your color palette.

I did a quick and not very good edit to try and show what i'm talking about:

[freespyryt]

Wow it's been a while since I posted...
Eyecraft's suggestions were vital. I suppose I should've mentioned, however, that he isn't meant to be wearing pants...or at least you can't see them. He's wearing a tunic. I *tried* to shade it this time around to make that show through, but I'm not sure if i succeeded 
Update:
I also tried to add more depth to the picture by adding some more blue between the arms and such. Anyway, thanks for the suggestions!

[freespyryt]

So, we decided to try going a little different direction for the hunter guy. We're making him (and the game, probably) a little bit bigger, and we're trying more of a different style. So I edited this sprite to look a little more...different? It's hard to describe. I made him taller and changed the shading, and made him have boots instead. He actually looks almost completely different IMO.
Updated guy:
So that thing in the middle of the torso going down to the legs is like a sash thing (like the guy from torchlight has) and there's stitching. But I think the stitching looks weird and I can't figure out how to do it right   Also, I think his arms look too much like he's wearing a snow suit, and I'm not quite sure how to fix them.
Anywayyyys   As always I'm asking for critiques and comments and any advice anyone can give on this. Thanks!

EDIT:
Here's another change I did, just to update the pose a little bit. I shortened his legs more to make it look more...balanced? It looks more like what I'm going for, I think.
Updated: