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Messages - Lurdiak
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Pixel Art / Re: First pixel art animation - Runing Cat
« on: June 05, 2010, 10:30:38 pm »
The cat's neck is at the wrong angle, as is his head... giving him a rather unnatural anthropomorphized look that contrasts with the decidedly feline motion you're going for. The front legs also don't curl nearly enough to properly emulate the movement of a kitty.

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Pixel Art / Re: Avatar(Batlorder)
« on: August 25, 2008, 01:10:40 am »
Your text is very hard to read, it hurts my eyes.

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Pixel Art / Re: Robot girl
« on: August 17, 2008, 02:57:18 pm »
Well the thing that really leaps at me is that your colors are very saturated and very close to each other, which makes the shading almost irrelevant in some places. You should vary them more, not just in shade, but in tone a bit. For example the darkest green in a dress is likely to be bluer and the lightest one yellower, that lets you make the colors seem darker and lighter compared to the other greens without having to use really dark or really light colors, which are more likely to read weird depending on the background. You have one of the colors on the boxing glove where the red stays exactly the same while being the dominant color, which is overdoing it in the wrong direction and quite frankly hurts my eyes when I look at it up close.

I get that with the light colors you're trying to accentuate the shiny, metallic robotic nature, but a better way to do it would be to just let the lightest colors in the equation take up more space and adjust the others accordingly, like in these WIP images of an eye I was working on:
Side by side:

Animated:


It's really not the best example, but you get what I mean, I think. Aside from that, the light area on the face is just way too large and flattens her entire head quite badly. Looking at just the face I see no light source.

I made a quick little edit on the colors (I changed the lightest and darkest colors of the hair, the two darkest of the dress, the darkest of the skin, the darkest of the socks, and the two darkest of the gloves), making them more contrasted in shading and tone and generally darker, and added a liittle bit of shading to her forehead. I also darkened the whole thing with the brightness adjust because it was still hurting my eyes with its brightness and it's just an example edit with half-assed color choices, but I think it can still give you an idea. Oh and I noticed you had 2 pixels on the outline of the glove in the foreground that were a little pinker than the rest, since I couldn't figure out a need for this I got rid of it.



As you can see, the details pop out a lot more and it gives a better illusion of depth. Looking at it now I really want to mess with the colors even more and make it even darker but I just wanted to give you a step in the right direction so I'll leave it up to your judgement.  :P

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Pixel Art / Re: Pixel Shrimp Volume 3
« on: August 08, 2008, 11:59:49 am »
Um, I can see what you mean by jellish, and I do agree that a shrimp should give off an organic feel, but I honestly don't feel like that's what this particular wobble projects. It comes across more as an inconsistency in its shape than deformation of it... like you took several pictures of a shrimp at different locations and tried to make an animation out of it, if you understand what I mean... It's a strange unnatural twitch.. Its face also seems to strangely extend...


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Pixel Art / FrankieSmileShow/Lurdiak Collab Game Sprites (now showing Boris the Eyeball)
« on: August 07, 2008, 11:27:42 pm »
Okay, so, me and FrankieSmileShow have been collaborating on what was originally a slapdash birthday gift of a game for a friend made in about 2 days. It turned out to be much more fun than anticipated and now we're working on making a more final version of it, after which we'll modify it to make it target a broader audience than "the one guy". The first step in doing this is to design and sprite new enemies to add variety to the game. So far, I'm working on the first new one, and without the time limit and the stress of the deadline, I was able to make something that isn't dreadfully embarassing. So I was thinking... what does every space shooter need? Why, a giant disembodied eye! A truly groundbreaking enemy design. Ladies and Genteel-men, I give you, Boris the Eyeball:



This sprite took a lot more tweaking and referencing than you'd think, especially since I kept coming up with new ideas for the look and having to take a few steps back and start over. One thing I definitely wanted to keep was the spherical feel of the exposed eye. I friggin' hate games where the eyes look like flat disks.

The colors on the left are my color scheme, and the ones on the right are the ones suggested by Frankie, who yelled at me for using pure reds. I can't decide which ones I like best.

I don't really feel like this is the final version, but I'm not really sure where to go from here... It's got character, but it certainly doesn't "ooze personality" :P  Maybe some animation would make it more visually interesting? It's going to spin in-game but I guess it could do more. Any C&C or advice is welcome! I'll probably post the final version here too.

More to come as we keep working on the game...

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Pixel Art / Re: platformer sprites and animation dump
« on: July 31, 2008, 01:04:54 pm »
I think part of what makes some of your tiles seem so flat is that they kind of parse as "a bunch of dots" in some places, which is compounded when you get a larger area of such tiles next to each other. As a simple fix for the cavern tiles I'd suggest varying the size of the little rocks that jut out, and try to give an illusion that some are jutting out further than the others as well. Before even that, breaking the feeling of symmetry will keep the eye from parsing it as a grid.

I made a really minor edit (technically my first tile work ever) to show what I'm talking about:

I edited the middle tile of this group:
(yours)
(mine)

It's barely noticeable when viewed like this, all I did was make some of the squares bigger and add little bits to ones near it to both create an illusion of depth and to break up the grid symmetry. It's a very minor, very sloppy edit, but look at the difference it makes when I replace that tile on your cave screenshot:



As you can see, it no longer parses like a bunch of dots on a flat background, but more like a textured surface. Obviously this is FAR from perfect but I just wanted to give you an idea of just how valuable asymmetry, varied shapes and varied sizes are. This sort of randomization and depth wouldn't work as well for your techno background, but the problem is still the same: it parses like a grid, which makes it look flat. I suggest looking at various techno tiles from megaman and other such games to get an idea of what you can do, and minimize the ammount of "dots" you have, even if all you do is make them bigger and add highlights and shadows around them.

Your character and animations are beyond reproach, and that is a sweet explosion, so I'm afraid that's all the advice a nubish like me can give you.

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General Discussion / Re: Introductions
« on: July 29, 2008, 03:51:50 am »
Hi, I guess I should post here even though I already sort of introduced myself in my pixel art thread. I'm a "veteran" pixel artist in the sense that I've been screwing around with pixels a while, but it took a long time before I was doing anything but changing megaman's hair color. I'm not sure how seriously I want to be a pixel guy in my life, I certainly don't plan on making a living off it, but I'd rather be able to make my own graphics whenever I get a game idea, which is often. Plus, pixel art is an end unto itself: it's fun. :)

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Pixel Art / Re: Orc Fighter needs improving
« on: July 26, 2008, 12:46:27 am »
Well, first of all, your color palette is too limited: your darkest green is not that much darker than your lightest green, so there's no real contrast, so that makes your guy look a lot flatter, since it doesn't look like light is hitting him anywhere. It's especially glaring in a style similar to Street Fighter Alpha, that relies on low details and high contrast.

I darkened his darkest green and lightened his lightest green, as well as lightening the lightest part of his shirt and fiddling around with the shadows a little, just to give you an idea. It still needs a lot of work but you can tell how much of an improvement just using more contrasting colors makes.



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Pixel Art / Re: Mr. Boxing From Outer Space and his terrible breathing problem
« on: July 26, 2008, 12:24:25 am »
Well, while I'm waiting for a reply, I'll just bump this with some older but decent work... no animation on these. They're my "learning curve", and part of an older project. Basically they're the most generic Beat-em-up crew I could come up with, all reeking heavily of the corniness of the early 90s and late 80s. I was heavily influenced by games like Final Fight and the Rushing Beat series for these. I made all of them by "shadowing" another sprite, rebuilding the silhouette until I was satisfied with the look, and then filling in the blanks, taking some cues from the musculature and clothes of the original sprite where applicable. Not to mention lots of fiddling with details as I stumbled blindly, with the help of FrankieSmileShow a good friend. Let's have a look.

Dirk Blazer:

Reference: Slash from Brawl Brothers


Arguably the best of the bunch, this one is 30% me and 70% FrankieSmileShow, who kept helping me along the way as I learned the ropes, doing tricks like shading better, creating light sources, reshaping the legs, helping out with the chain and zipper effects, etc. He's the hero, and of course his girlfriend gets kidnapped. I planned an introduction where he'd see his girlfriend was held hostage on the news, which would cause him to punch a hole in the TV screen, kick his own door down, and bust onto the streets of Stage 1. He embodies all the "cool" attributes of this particular era, and he's sort of got a neo-Fonz look going on, if we're lenient enough to call early 90s fashion "neo".

Bigger Thugs:

Reference: Al from Peace Keepers


A couple of middling sized thugs. The "kinda big" but not "the big" thug of the game. The one on the left is the first one I made mostly by myself, and it kind of shows. His left arm is totally awkwardly placed, and this is a symptom of the overall bigger problem of following the silhouette too much. Al's position is radically different from what I wanted to do, but I still was too afraid to truly change the thug shadow's shape, thus resulting in this mediocre mess and weird body shape. Another problem is the tattoo on his left arm, which looks very little like a tattoo.

The other two are recolored headswaps with a few details added to give them a little more personality. All good beat-em-ups knew to create variants of every enemy type! The one in the middle is more military, obviously, and the look of the one on the right is inspired by a famous pro wrestler(guess which). I didn't really name these guys, but I'm tempted to call the middle one "Sarge".


Harrier, Spider and Buzz

Reference: Mic from Final Fight 2


This is probably the one I'm proudest of. Looking at it now, I see some issues with the color palettes and his right arm, amongst others, but overall it ended up looking like I wanted it to, and isn't a slave to his reference as much as the bigger guys. These guys are the game's punching bags, cannon fodder: the lowest thugs of the games, the ones you'll see first. I wanted to give them a run-down, small guy feel.

Debbie

Reference: Wendy from Brawl Brothers


Her leg is wrong, amongst other things that leap out at me... The color palette needs work too. The Tough Grrl of the game, Debbie has rollerskates to move around faster and to fit her corny aerobics theme. The perm is very 80s.

Krowley

References: The clawed Thug from Peace Keepers and J from Final Fight


Okay I used a pretty awful basis for this guy, which is a big part what led me to reconsider my "shadowing other sprites" technique, especially since I was taking so few risks with it. I also used J as an actual reference for the ruffles in his coat. This guy was meant to be the lanky dude who's prone to throwing knives or slide-kicking you, and these dudes are usually freak-os, so I decided to give him a Crow look. His right arm and hand are messed up and the angle of his left one is awkward, a result of my poor choice of "template".

So yeah, that's my previous work. Even though I can see some of the flaws now that I've improved my pixel-fu, I'd like to hear what other problems you guys can spot, and advice for improving them.

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Pixel Art / Lurdiak's pixel stuff - Beat-em-up
« on: July 24, 2008, 05:15:52 am »
Hi to all from an amateurish Pixel Hopeful. I was referred here by a dear friend of mine who's mastery of pixel art was so good that it inspired me to try to drastically improve from "guy who sometimes changed megaman's hair color in his spare time(hyperbole but still)" to "guy who could conceivably do the entire pixel work of a fun, professional-looking freeware game". I'm not really at my goal yet... or even halfway there, really. I have improved dramatically since I started really trying to learn instead of dicking around with other blind people on terrible forums like Bobandgeorge, but I still have a lot to learn and a lot of problems to fix.

Right now I'm working on a simple-ish video game called "Mr. Boxing from Outer Space". The outlandish name was inspired by a contest on another forum where people would use the Video Game Name Generator until a name struck their fancy, then build a game around it. I knew I could never hope to win the contest or even finish the game within the deadline, but I decided to do this anyway as a personal project. Mr. Boxing From Outer Space struck me as a great concept so I ran with it. I decided I wanted to make it a final Fight-esque Beat-em-up, but a little cartoonier. I also decided I wanted Mr. Boxing to be, well, a boxer, so I knew I needed some boxing stance references, which I found here.

To create Mr. Boxing's standing frame, I reduced the "upright stance" to two colors, blacked out the silhouette entirely, and messed around with its shape until it looked more like something I could work with. I then filled in muscles, details and colors as I went, thinking about the design and modifying the look and shape accordingly. I am not really sure if you'd call it tracing since I only used a bare "skeleton" as a guiding point to my final result, but if it is considered such, I'm sorry. I eventually settled on a so-wholesome-it's-sickening guideline for the character design. He looks somewhere between heroic and smug, or at least he's meant to. I put in a little bit of Super Punch Out!'s Super Macho Man, and a little bit of Appolo Creed. I also mostly used Final Fight and Super Punch Out! as anatomy references. After finishing the basic design, including his special star belt (the source of his super boxing power), I set upon creating a breathing animation following this tutorial: http://www.gas13.ru/v3/tutorials/sywtbapa_breathing_life_into_sprites.php. The first 4 frames went relatively well. I used Street Fighter Alpha Balrog's breathing animation as a loose guideline to what I wanted to do (though I wanted my character to come across as more relaxed) and also used his arms and gloves as references at times.



Not perfect, but I thought it was satisfactory. Next, I wanted the character to lower his arms rather fast, a drop if you will, then bring them back up to loop into that first 4-frame circle, creating a kind of circular feel where his arms go out then come back in. I planned on adjusting things like the hair bounce and the shorts as I went along. I also wanted the knees to actually bend. However, things went dramatically wrong and I am now at an impasse:



I'm a few frames shy  of looping but I had to stop. Obviously, the movement doesn't look natural at all. It doesn't gel with the previous 4 frames and looks totally stiff. Furthermore, it doesn't look at all like a boxing stance movement. I've worked and worked at it but it still comes across as weird looking.

I welcome any and all advice on these faulty frames, pixel animation in general, the design, the colors, or basically any criticism you can lob my way. Even though this is my best work yet, I don't mind someone tearing it apart so I can improve it and make something better next time. Thanks in advance!  :y:

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