Critique > Pixel Art
Sprites and tiles and UI bits, oh my!
fskn:
Great tips from SeinRuhe (plenty of them!) and cels.
I do agree with the side animations not looking like they're being seen from above.
It looks like the main problem with the sprite in general is structure. And it's hard to give solid advice without knowing the actual perspective you're using. Buuut... I'd say you could try and make a sort of basic, super simple 3D-ish character model using balls (for the head and hands, don't be silly...) and boxes. Solids, if you will. Then adding the features needed. Thus you would have a more convincing interaction between the characters and the environment they're in.
Something like...
(hopefully that'll get the idea across.)
EDIT: Whoops, silly me, forgot to add depth to the side view of the torso:
eliddell:
I think cels has nailed just what was wrong with the side frames—they're too side-on. That's what I get for using other people's sprite work as reference without checking that they got it right. :blind:
Fresh attempt at the front frame, redone mostly from scratch:
Not quite sure about the legs, shorts, ears, or perspective, but we've gone from robotic-expressionless to, "Hey, I'm having a bad day, and if you get in my way, you're going to have a worse one." That's probably an improvement. He's also acquired a shadow, and some muscle definition. Looking back at the original sprite, I'm not quite sure what I was thinking in some regards.
About the tiles—I was mostly just kvetching, truth be told. The only terrain tiles that would be affected are what would have been shadowed wall corners under the old lighting scheme. The item tiles that will need to be reworked are mostly 1. mushrooms or 2. armour, and some of the armour tiles are pretty terrible anyway.
The perspective is intended to sort of match the cabinet perspective typical of SNES-era Squaresoft games like Final Fantasy VI, but the sprites in those are so small it's difficult to figure out whether they're perfectly side-on or matching the terrain. I'm not doing the weird Zelda perspective where you can see all four walls at once or anything like that.
I do have this broken down into chunks/small milestones, although I sometimes get a bit ahead of myself. Next set of art assets required: the goblin and his move, attack, and die animations, and one monster (giant rat) and its move, attack, and die animations. Next coding milestone: hook up certain bits of the UI so that they're displaying real information and not placeholders, and debug the minimap that's supposed to be appearing on the bottom right. At that point, I can either work on basic combat or sidestep into dungeon feature placement for a bit.
Existing terrain tiles (I'm not thrilled with the floor tiles, but they don't look quite as bad in context as they do here):
Existing item tiles (the mushrooms will not be grey in-game):
Terrain tiles in context (procedurally generated level with old goblin sprite and unfinished UI bits):
SeinRuhe:
Great work! Now that's a Goblin! I'll get on some specifics regarding execution this time, bear with me because it may get a little dense.
I think you are over rendering the character and this prompts some issues I'll try my best to explain them and how to fix them:
- There's a lot of banding on the character, this is when there are two sets (or more) of pixels that goes along the other like a staircase, since I suck explaining I'm also adding a visual explanation.
- There's also room for improvement on the light department, I'll explain this with the head only, basically, when an object is lit from above, the planes that face more towards the light will be the ones that receive most light, so they will have the brightest shade, so the top of the forehead should be brighter than the middle of the forehead, but more than that, the shading on the top of the head should touch the outline.
- I see that you are trying to describe the arms as round with the shading, for this is better to have the darkest shade in the middle of the form (Where the terminator is located) due reflective light, this does not need to be super accurate and reflect the correct hue, just a change of value is more than enough. Also keep in mind that limbs resemble a bit more a box than a cylinder, actually a mix of both :crazy: .
Tiles, sketch or not, look kinda good, my only advice would be to rely more on clusters of pixels to generate texture instead of noise/orphans.
Items suffer from something weird caused by how they are shaded, if you shade with the lightest shade on top, the mid shade on the middle and the darkest shade on the bottom stuff starts to look like a block (think of Mario question block from the NES) try to apply the thing I said earlier of the terminator, you may see an improvement, if not just apply what I said about the planes, and if not let me know to do some extra research :D .
Lastly, I'm almost certain the screenshot you posted last has some kind of compression because it looks really antialiased.
If something I said makes no sense let me know and I'll try my best to explain it better.
cels:
SeinRuhe beat me to the punch and did a better job but I will post this as a show of solidarity.
- Totally agree about too much banding.
- I also notice that your color ramps are a bit linear (all basically the same hue, rather than going from colder to warmer). Not a huge issue but may be worth thinking about.
- In regards to lighting, banding and clusters, I think it's potentially problematic that your sprite currently has so much detail packed into it and so few large clusters. It's going to be more labor-intensive if you're going to highlight every ab muscle and use five different shades on his arms. If you look at some of Wolfenoctis' sprites (here), he's very clever at conveying detail without using too many colors and too detailed shading. He also uses very large clusters sometimes, which is probably great for animation. So it's not that one is better than the other, but if you're doing a lot of animated sprites, it might be worth thinking about. Even if you keep the most important sprite (the goblin) more detailed.
- In regards to items, totally agree about clusters vs orphans / noise
eliddell:
Okay, iteration the next:
Reduced the banding, reshaded several areas. I think that unless you guys can spot something grossly wrong, I'm going to leave it at that, and move on to the back and side views.
I'm aware that I tend to introduce way too much banding and grain into my work (and then have trouble spotting it myself). Not doing much in the way of art for a couple of years probably made it worse.
Minor details: the gradients are hue shifted, just not by very much—if you look at HSV samples, the lightest green has a hue of around 80, and the darkest is around 100. Too conservative, probably.
The image host seems to have recompressed the big screenshot at the end of my earlier post :( . Good to know before I post about this project elsewhere, I suppose—I'll need to use smaller screenshots, find a higher-bandwidth image host, or dig out my login info for the webspace I've had for the past ten years but never used. (Some of it would have shown anti-aliasing anyway, since the most of the UI is built out of primitives drawn by the game framework, but nothing like that.)
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