Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: BenMcLean on November 16, 2016, 07:15:19 pm
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I drew this little space man for a game I'm working on. He has a transparent glass bubble helmet.
(http://i.imgur.com/dAKtzpK.png)
But I'm not a very good artist. I was wondering if I could get some help with this.
He needs to fit in 16x16 pixel squares and be in 2-bit color. (that's four colors, except I'm cheating to also add transparency as a "fifth color") I'm going to be using palette swapping to be able to change the colors of my artwork at runtime. I'll probably separate out his head and helmet into a separate sprite eventually so that I can make more characters with the same body just by swapping out different heads and changing the head colors.
What I need help with: I want to make more sheets of him where he is shooting some kind of gun facing in all these directions. Or maybe he has hand blasts like Iron Man, I dunno. Whatever's easiest to draw.
The really challenging thing is that I want the projectiles coming out of his gun, in both horizontal and vertical directions, to be centered in the middle of the tile. Maybe he holds a rifle-like kind of laser gun in both hands? Or maybe just have him act like he's throwing the projectiles?
If I could get him pushing and throwing things (just being in the appropriate poses for that) then that would help me as well. I'm also totally open to giving him a better walk cycle or anything that would have him make more physical sense within these technical constraints. Also maybe him being dead, taking damage, jumping, flying, climbing, nodding, sleeping, dancing or doing anything else cool that occurs to you.
Also very interested in getting more 16x16 2-bit art in general. I have a hard rule on this project that all art assets must be allow me to swap palettes at runtime. This is gonna be a very proc-gen heavy kind of game. This little guy should be inhabiting a world that looks alot like the overworld from Final Fantasy 1 (NES) except it could be almost any color combination. I'm also trying to figure out the best way to have 16x16 pixel art map tiles.
My little space man drawing there is public domain as far as I'm concerned, but I would informally request that anyone who contributes to it please do not add the evil "Non-Commercial" option to any license you add to artwork derived from it. I need to be able to use this in games that could eventually be in a commercial release, although I plan to also keep them open source. If you help then you will totally get credit.
I'm working on trying to reduce the blowhard chronicles art by surt (http://opengameart.org/content/blowhard-2-blow-harder) to 2-bit for this. I was kind of following the general pattern of his characters to make this space man.
This game was originally going to be a demake of No Man's Sky but since No Man's Sky was received so poorly, I'm thinking this is going to be more of an "8-bit game a little bit like No Man's Sky except done right."
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I don't know why I said 8x8 yesterday. I guess I was tired and wasn't thinking. He's actually 16x16.
I have given individual names to 350 16x16 tiles today for this game, describing their individual functions. But I still haven't thought of a solution for how to show this guy shooting things. Any help or advice would be appreciated!
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Small edit for you if you're still checking in on this thread.
(http://i.imgur.com/YnEvd75.png)
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Wow, that looks awesome! Better than mine in some ways. But I'd have to get rid of the white part since I eventually decided to stop cheating and switch to strictly 4 colors, including transparency. I even built a shader to do the palette swapping at runtime (https://github.com/BenMcLean/4-color-palette-swap-shader).
Do you think you could flesh that out a little more? Give him walk cycles facing in all 4 directions? And maybe add a gun, (centered so the projectiles come out in the center of a tile) or poses for hand blasts? He's gonna need to walk, push things, shoot things and mine minerals somehow. (although he might use the same sprites for mining as for shooting)
I might decide to use separate sprites for the body and head, like Mega Man.
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Hey now, it's one thing to ask for critique, but it's another to just request free work without even offering anything in return, yeah?
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Shrug. It's an open source project (https://github.com/BenMcLean/Planet-Generator) and I'm broke. What would you suggest?
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the purpose of these critiques is to see you try to put our feedback and tweaks through your own work. It's not a forum to get free art done for your projects unless you're posting to the unpaid work section of the forum, these are to help you improve your pieces and technique.
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Oh, OK. Well its some of both, since I do have this little guy but I kind of got stuck trying to expand his set of poses. His arms and legs kind of dont look the right lengths when he walks
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Post them, it's what this thread is for!
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What mysterymeat said. No hate tho, just keep posting and others will be sure to chime in.
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What i mean is, his arms and legs don't look the right lengths when he walks in the image in the original post.
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Just to moderate here a bit, although most have been pointed out already:
Critique is the section where artists of all kinds can get help from other artists, depending if they have time.
It's like free education, which is a service, which takes the providing artist already time and most of us here try to give back to people, since they also received help as they started out.
Asking one of the artists who provided an edit to actually work for free is something which is maybe not thenicest thing to do in a forum, where most artists who give critique are professionals and they do it on top of their working schedule for free.
Of course most of those artists work also will be done faster, or of higher quality than of newbies who post here, but time/skill usually translates to freelance rates as well.
Getting serious critique though and applying it to your work and making it better step by step and learning while doing so is something which makes yourself a better artist. THe gain from the critique section lies in learning and improving yourself, not necessarily in receiving a good edit you can use instead of your own art.
If you need to get free work done, please use the "Unpaid Work" section of the forum which you can find here:
http://pixelation.org/index.php?board=14.0 (http://pixelation.org/index.php?board=14.0)
Of course nobody took offense so far, but the spirit of this section on the forum exclusively lies on learning the craftmanship ofmaking pixel art by doing it yourself.
And if you want to receive help, the best thing you can do is to show what you already created.
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Oh OK. I'll probably post there soon then. Thanks.