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Topics - Lurdiak
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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 / 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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