Pixelation
Critique => Pixel Art => Topic started by: ElementalShrew on March 27, 2021, 12:28:25 pm
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I am new here! Please correct me if I followed directions wrong!
I made a series of animated sprite for a practice game, and I might need some feedback on what can be done better and more importantly, how and where can I find sources to improve!
There might be too many to directly pose here, so here is a link to my display website: https://fliu01.myportfolio.com/project-twilight-tecton (https://fliu01.myportfolio.com/project-twilight-tecton)
And here is a couple of examples:
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Oh man, that's a super cute sprite! I don't know much about animation, but I do feel like this sprite would be better with more contrast (darker shadows) and it might be cool if the light from shooting the gun actually illuminated the front of the sprite more. Especially if the greys are supposed to be metal.
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Hmm. The yellow sprites do stand out pretty well against the (rather dark and unsaturated) terrain tiles. I do wonder how easy it is to quickly tell one sprite from another, though—they all have the same limited, low-contrast palette, and it's often distributed rather similarly. The life/energy/whatever-they-are bars hovering over the individual sprites' heads are difficult to pick out where they happen to overlap with another sprite, so I hope it isn't necessary to the game to be able to figure out the readings on them quickly.
The dark sprites (enemies, I presume) aren't going to stand out nearly as well as the yellow ones. That's a potential problem from a gameplay perspective.
The animation looks smooth, and I think it's telegraphing the movements clearly. Realism isn't that much of a concern when the sprites are already this stylized. (Take that with a grain of salt, though—like cels, I'm not exactly a master animator.)
From a purely artistic perspective, cels is right: you could do with more contrast. On just about everything.
From a *game art* perspective, making the enemies stand out more (and making it clear which sprites are enemies) is probably the most important thing. My suggestion would be to never use yellow on the enemies, only the blues and grays (and make sure each enemy has at least some blue on it, so that it doesn't vanish into the shadows). Pick a third accent colour for neutral units or objects, if there are any.
(I also wouldn't cover such a large chunk of the top-right corner with the UI, or at least experiment with it being in a clearly delineated area at the top or bottom, but I do realize that may not have been your idea.)
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The style is perfect, I think the animation is on point too, loved the one of the little guy shooting with a gun on each hand.
I think the saturation and values of the palette can be improved, specially the values, we as humans crave contrast for a reason beyond my understanding.
The other thing that can be improved are the tilesets, they lack the definition of the character and some shadows are so shallow that ended up looking like an outline. Maybe referencing some artist that are good at environment could help.
I hope this helps somehow, sadly I'm not great at explaining :'(
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we as humans crave contrast for a reason beyond my understanding.
If I ever write an art tutorial, I will use this quote. :lol:
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we as humans crave contrast for a reason beyond my understanding.
If I ever write an art tutorial, I will use this quote. :lol:
Just make sure to let me know, I'll send you a pic with my best retarded face for you to make a quote with it xD