Hey, all!  Tsugumo back from the dead here, but unfortunately not in a very pixely form!

Been busy taking a business course and getting an iPhone dev license and working on a game that should be going live this Sunday.  I've been documenting the progress of it over at Bulletproof Outlaws with pretty much 100+ days worth of daily updates.  Derek of Ravenous Games (who made the pixel intensive League of Evil for the iPhone) did the programming.

It's all hand-drawn and "3d cel-shaded to look 2d" art because the iDevices are powerful enough to push some pretty large graphics around and I wanted to try making something anime-ish, though I haven't left pixels forever...I'll probably be doing some pixel art for a League of Evil update down the road!


It's not pixel art but I figured I'd pop in and let you guys know that I'm not dead yet, I'm just too busy to have much of a message board presence anywhere.    Good to see the place is still running and doing awesome, and that some familiar names are still around.

- Tsugumo

It doesn't have to be exactly the same in each view. The differences make it look more natural.

My thinking on it is two things:

1) with a "side" animation like steam, sparks, misc little stuff, if you keep them in the same place on the character through all 3 angles, there are only 2 unique puffs of steam total coming out of the guy as a character...but if you have them in different places on each angle, then that's like 6 unique puffs.  So it kind of gives more unique animations to him.  It would be similar to, say, having a guy with a long trailing Ryu style headband running left and right, and on the left run his headband flows in one motion and on the right run his headband flows in a different motion.  Just something to add a little more variation in the animation.  It's not something anyone really pays attention to unless they see the frames side by side like this, it's just psychologically you think "ya that has a lot of animation"

2) art-wise it's just a balance...if in the side view, there's a lot of space in front of him, then I'm going to make the cloud poof come out of like, his knee, and rise up in front in that empty space.  if in the back view there's a lot of space behind him, then I'm going to make that cloud poof come out of his ankle to fill that space.  I guess it could be like that Disney animation rule of making a character look good in silhouette form so you never have him doing stuff in front of him, always do it off to the side so it's obvious what's going on...keeping the cloud poof at the exact same point on the exact same frames might look good on the side view but cover half of his sword or something in the front view.

also I didn't totally notice when I drew it heh...but it's not something I pay attention to usually for these 2 reasons, unless I'm specifically asked to make the character exactly consistent in all directions.

Also, I totally know what you mean about red. I always thought it might have been my inexperience. Good to know red just doesn't work that way

good, glad someone else has run into it, heh...red is a really weird color in pixel stuff.  Capcom always uses super intense red for like, Ryu's headband and stuff...that's why I did it for the ninja turtle looking guy in MK.  just RGB: 255/0/0 but I don't get why exactly.  something to do with how it shows up on a screen I guess.

- Tsugumo

Love this thread...that first sheet of characters rocks.  I dig the colors and designs and everything...I'd shit myself if I had to animate them, but they're sweet to look at. 

Also the tentacle guy is stylin'...I've always wanted to do a tentacle character animation just for practice but haven't gotten around to it yet.

- Tsugumo

Awesome stuff man...I love seeing/reading behind-the-scenes stuff for games, even if I haven't played them.  I'm that guy that rents a DVD and watches it 4 times before it goes back, listening to each of the commentary tracks, heh...it's fun to see what went on behind the project, and sometimes you can pick up valuable info/ideas/methods that other people are using.

Plus the art for this is great, so it's pretty to just look at even   I'm still personally pretty bad with metal/mech designs but I like the style you used here (highlit inside-edges and such...nice and clean).

putting this game on regular phones would mean making a different game, one that was more accommodating to smaller, vertical screens and more limited controls.

Plus they would explode, heh...cell phones are ridiculously limited   You can't even rotate/scale sprites on 'em, boo-urns!  Plus most phones only read one button at a time so you can't like, be holding left and hit a shoot button.  Sometimes I'm not even sure how there's a market for cell phone games, heh...but the phones are getting better and the shittiest phone now isn't anywhere near as bad as the shittiest phone a few years ago, so it's picking up.  Some of the newer phones we've messed with run our games like, blazing fast...can't wait till those are the standard.

- Tsugumo